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CULTURE AND RELIGION. 



-% 



CULTURE AND RELIGION 



IN SOME OF THEIR RELATIONS. 



»/ 



r^ cH&AIRP, 



PRINCIPAL OP THE UNITED COLLEGE OP ST. SALVATOR AND ST. LEONARD, 
ST. ANDREWS. 



[Reprinted Jrom the Edinburgh Edition,] 




NEW YORK: ^ 
PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON. 

1871. 






EIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

ITEBEOriPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY, 



/Z-Zf^-^S' 



PEEFAOE. 



This little book is a small contribution to 
a great subject. The five Lectures which it 
contains were delivered, on five successive 
Saturdays of last Winter Session, to as many 
of the Students of the United College and 
others as chose to attend. They were orig- 
inally written with a view solely to immedi- 
ate delivery. The publication of them is an 
afterthought. It is needless to explain my 
reasons for publishing them, for these could 
neither increase nor diminish their value, 
whatever that may be. One object, how- 
ever, which I hope may be gained by publi- 
cation is to place them in a permanent form 
before those for whom they were originally 
intended. As lectures, meant to be under- 
stood on first hearing, they are naturally in 
a style more popular and diffuse than might 
have beseemed a regular treatise. They are 



Vlll PREFACE. 

printed almost as they were spoken, with the 
exception of the Fifth Lecture, to which 
some passages have been added. 

It need hardly be said that no attempt is 
here made at systematic, much less at ex- 
haustive, treatment of the subject. To have 
aimed at this within the space and in the 
form to which I have restricted myself, 
would have been impossible. All I have 
wished to do is to set forth certain views, 
which seem to me true in themselves, and 
yet likely to be passed over too lightly, or 
set aside too summarily, by the intellectual 
temper of the time. No satisfactory adjust- 
ment of the questions here entertained can, 
I believe, be reached without assigning to the 
spiritual side of man's being and of truth a 
prominence and an importance, which do not 
seem to have entered into the thoughts of 
some of the ablest advocates of Culture. 
Indeed, to many, and these not the most fool- 
ish of mankind. Culture seems then only to 
be worthy of serious regard when it minis- 
ters to faith, — when it enables men to see 
spiritual things more truly and deeply. If 
it obstructs or dims the vision of these things, 



PREFACE, ix 

as sometimes it does, it then ceases to have 
for them any value. 

In handling subjects on which all men 
have some thoughts, it is impossible exactly 
to determine where one's own end and those 
of others begin. Where, however, I have 
been aware that any thought or expression 
of thought has been suggested to me by an- 
other writer, I have tried to acknowlege it, 
either by quoting in the text some of the 
author's words, or by giving a quotation from 
his works in the Notes. Of the passages 
printed in the Appendix, some were directly 
suggestive of the thought in the text, others 
are merely adduced as confirmations of it. 
It would have been easy to have increased 
the number of the Notes, but they were 
drawn out at a place remote from libraries, 
and were taken only from those books which 
happened to be at hand. J. C. Shairp. 

September 1, 1870. 



co:NTEi^rTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Aim of Culture — its Relation to Re- 
ligion 13 

II. The Scientific Theory of Culture . . 45 

III. The Literary Theory of Culture . . 74 

IV. Hindrances to Spiritual Growth . . 104 
V. Religion combining Culture with Itself . 133 



Notes 179 



OULTUEE AJND EELIGIOI^ 



LECTUEE L 

THE AIM OF CULTURE — ITS RELATION TO RE- 
LIGIOIf. 

When one is called, following the prac- 
tice of former Principals, to lecture to the 
students of this College on some branch of 
thought or knowledge, and when, with a 
single restriction, it is left undefined what 
the subject shall be, the selection might nat- 
urally be supposed to give rise to some em- 
barrassment. But two conditions are at 
hand to restrict and determine the lecturer's 
choice. One is, that he must choose some 
subject with which his past studies or ex- 
perience have made him in some degree 
familiar ; the other is, that the subject should 
be such as he may reasonably hope will 
either interest or benefit his hearers, — if 
possible, do both. 

It seemed to me not unfitting that, on this 



14 THE AIM OF CULTURE. 

first occasion of my lecturing to you in a new 
capacity, I sliould speak on some subject of 
wide and general interest^ which commands 
a view, not so much of any one department 
of study, as of the last and highest ends of 
all study. 

Other opportunities may be given for tak- 
ing up some one definite subject, historical or 
other, and dealing with it in detail. 

For this year I shall be well content if, 
without pretending to overtake, much less 
exhaust, the wide subject which I bring be- 
fore you, I shall be enabled to offer a few 
suggestions, which may be of use to some 
who hear me, on matters which very nearly 
concern them. The questions I shall have 
to touch on might easily be made to land us 
in the most abstract and speculative investi- 
gations. It shall, however, be my endeavor, 
as far as possible, to keep clear of these, and 
to put what I have to say in a concrete and 
practical shape. This I shall do both for 
other reasons, and especially from the convic- 
tion that we in Scotland, by getting hold of 
all subjects by the metaphysical end of them, 
often contrive to squeeze out of them what- 
ever vital sap they contain. 

The question what it is we aim at in men- 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION, 16 

tal cultivation, and what relation this latter 
bears to religion, cannot be said to be out of 
place here ; for in considering these ques- 
tions we are brought to contemplate steadily 
what is the end of university life, and in 
what relation university life stands to the 
ultimate ends of life taken as a whole. If a 
University like this exists for any purpose, I 
suppose it is to promote mental culture, that 
is, the cultivation not merely of certain tech- 
nical and professional faculties, but, over and 
above these, of the whole man. A few years 
ago there would have been no need to utter 
a truism like this ; but we live at present in 
a time of intellectual revulsions. What were 
till lately held to be first principles are now 
from time to time made the butts for edu- 
cational reactionists to jeer at. We have 
II lately heard it asserted by men speaking 
with some authoritv that universities and all 
other places of education exist for one pur- 
pose only, — to train men for their special 
crafts or trades. If they do this well, they 
are useful ; if they do not, they are good for 
nothing. The belief in any ulterior end be- 
yond this is denied and ridiculed. Yet, in 
spite of the utilitarian logic of Mr. Lowe, 
and the more humorous banter of our pres- 



16 THE AIM OF CULTURE. 

ent Lord Rector, I must still believe that, 
above and beyond special professional train- 
ing, there is such a thing as mental culture 
and enlargement, and that this is an excel- 
lent gift in itself, apart from any gain it may 
bring, and that it is one main end of uni- 
versities to foster the desire and further the 
attainment of it. The man, I must still hold, 
is more than his trade. The spirit that is in 
each man craves other nourishment than the 
bread he wins. 

I do not, in saying this, forget that we 
have each our special work in the world to 
do, — as lawyers, physicians, teachers, minis- 
ters, and the like, — and that it tasks all our 
streno-th and knowledo;e to do it. All men, 
or almost all, are bound to throw themselves 
vigorously into some one of the known pro^ 
fessions, and this not for food and raiment 
only, but as a necessary part of their moral 
discipline. Few, very few, there are who, 
even if their circumstances admit it, can dis- 
pense with the wholesome yoke of a profes- 
sion, and yet live to any good purpose. But 
while fully acknowledging not only the ne- 
cessity, but the advantage of being harnessed 
to some regular profession, and that to suc- 
ceed in this the finest edge of faculty and 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION, 17 

the most accurate technical training must be 
sought, I still believe there is something 
more than this, and greater, which must 
never be lost sight of, if we desire to become 
not mere useful machines or instruments, but 
complete men. The professional man who, 
over and above his daily duties and business 
relations, has learned to feel that he has 
other relations, wider and more permanent, 
with all his fellow-beino-s in all ao;es, — that 
he is a debtor for all he has and is to a wider 
circle of things than that he outwardly comes 
in contact with, — that he is an heir of all 
the great and good who have lived before 
him, — is not on that account a worse work- 
man, and is certainly a higher and better 
man. 

It is not, then, a mere dream, but a very 
real aim, which they propose who urge us to 
seek " a fuller, more harmonious develop- 
ment of our humanity, greater freedom from 
narrowness and prejudice, more width of 
thought, more expansive sympathies, feelings 
more catholic and humane, a high and un- 
selfish ideal of life." These are the quali- 
ties which university training, if it had its 
perfect work, might be expected to generate 
and foster. And it does this by bringing 



18 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

young minds, while they are still plastic, into 
contact with whatever is best in the past his- 
tory of the race, — with the great deeds, the 
high thoughts, the beautiful creations wdiich 
the best men of former times have be- 
queathed to us. To learn to know and sym- 
pathize with these is the work not of one or 
two years, but of our whole lives. Yet the 
process may be said to begin here, and in a 
special way to belong to the university. For 
here, if anywhere, it is that the avenues are 
first opened up which lead to the great store- 
house of foregone humanities, — here that 
our apprehension of these things is first 
awakened. But a small portion of all this 
richness we can take in durino; our short 
university course, — riot much, it may be, in 
a whole life-time. But it is somethino; to 
have come to know and feel that these 
things exist, — exist, too, for us, in as far as 
we can appropriate them, and to have had 
our thouo;hts and desires directed thitherward. 
When the perception of these things and the 
love of them have been evoked, culture has 
begun, and the university life is the natural 
time for it. If this desire does not begin 
here, it is not often awakened afterwards. 
But what do we mean by this fine word 



ITS DELATION TO RELIGION, 19 

Culture, so much in vogue at present? 
What the Greeks naturally expressed by 
their TratSeta, the Romans by their huma7iitas^ 
we less happily try to express by the more 
artificial word Culture. The use of it in its 
present sense is, as far as I know, recent in 
our language, forced upon us, I suppose, by 
the German talk about '-Bildung." And the 
shifts we have been put to, to render that 
German word, seem to show that the thing 
is with us something of an exotic, rather than 
native to the soil. When applied to the hu- 
man being, it means, I suppose, the " educ- 
ing or drawing forth all that is potentially in 
a man," the training all the energies and ca- 
pacities of his being to the highest pitch, and 
directing them to their true ends. The 
means that it employs to attain these ends are 
manifold and various, as manifold as are the 
experiences of life. But one of the most pow- 
erful and characteristic instruments of culture 
is, as I have said, to bring young and plastic 
minds into contact with all that is best and 
greatest in the thoughts, the sentiments, the 
deeds of past generations of men, in order 
that these may melt into them and mould the 
character. But culture is not a product of 
mere study. Learning may be got from 



20 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

books, but not culture. It is a more living 
process, and requires that the student shall at 
times close his books, leave his solitary room, 
and mingle with his fellow-men. He must 
seek the intercourse of living hearts as well 
as of dead books, — especially the companion- 
ship of those of his own contemporaries whose 
minds and characters are fitted to instruct, 
elevate, and sweeten his own. Another 
thing required is the discipline which must 
be carried on by each man in himself, the 
learning of self-control, the forming of habits, 
the effort to overcome what is evil and to 
strengthen what is good in his own nature. 
But to enumerate all the means of culture 
would be impossible, seeing they are wide as 
the world, and the process begins with the 
cradle, and, we may well believe, does not 
end with the grave. What, then, is the re- 
lation in which a university stands to this 
great life-process ? It may be said to be a 
sort of microcosm, — a small practical abridg- 
ment of an unending book, — a compend of 
the past thought and cultivation of the race, 
reduced to the shape and dimensions best 
fitted to be taken in. And this abridgment 
or summary of the past experience of the 
race is applied to young minds just at the age 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 21 

which is most susceptible to receive impres- 
sions deeply, and retain them permanently. 

Every one must observe to what a large 
extent the advocates of education nowadays, 
of the lowest as well as of the highest, agree 
in urging it for the moral fruits it produces. 
Remove ignorance, say the advocates of pri- 
mary education, and you put an end to crime. 
And though we may doubt the necessity of 
the alleged sequence, we gladly accept their 
testimony to the moral aim which all educa- 
tion should imply. The Culturists, again — 
by which term I mean not those who esteem 
culture, (as what intelligent man does not?) 
but those, its exclusive advocates, who rec- 
ommend it as the one panacea for all the ills 
of humanity, — the Culturists are never done 
insisting that it is not for its utilitarian results, 
not for the technical skill and information it 
implies, nor for the professional success it may 
secure, that they value culture, but for its 
effect in elevating the whole man. They tell 
us that men, in the last resort, are not formed 
by rules or precepts, no, nor by what are 
called moral principles, — that men's lives 
and characters are determined mainly by their 
ideal, that is, by the thing they lay to heart 
and live by, often without themselves being 



22 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

aware of it, by that which they in their in- 
most souls love, desire, aim at, as the best 
possibility for themselves and others. By the 
ideal, therefore, that a man loves, and by his 
persistency in cleaving to it, and working for 
it, shall you know what he really is. This 
ideal, whatever it be, seen and embraced, 
and melting into a man, constitutes his true 
and essential nature, and reveals itself in all 
he thinks and does. They tell us, and truly, 
that it is not the educated and refined only 
who have their ideal, — that every man, even 
the most illiterate, has an ideal, whether he 
knows it or not ; that is, every man has some- 
thino; which forms the ruling; thouo:ht, the 
main desire, of his life. The beggar in his 
rags is not without his ideal, though that 
probably does not go beyond plenty to eat 
and drink, and a comfortable house to live in. 
If he be advanced a little above abject want, 
then perhaps his ideal is to become wealthy, 
respected of all men for his riches. These, 
though material aims, are yet none the less 
ideals to those who entertain them. The 
Culturists, then, go on to say that, since everv 
man must have his ideal, — material and self- 
ish, or unselfish and spiritual, — it lies mainly 
with culture to determine whether men shall 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION, 23 

rest content with grosser aims or raise their 
thoughts to the higher ideals. These lat- 
ter, they remind us, are manifold : there is 
the ideal poetical, the ideal scientific, the 
ideal political, the ideal philanthropic : and 
that which of these, or other such like, a man 
shall set before him must be determined by 
his inborn bias and temperament, his natural 
gifts, and his outward circumstances. There 
are diversities of gifts, and to every man his 
own gift. The kind and measure of gifts 
each man has will shape and modify the ideal 
w^liich is proper to him. And each man's 
practical wisdom consists in truly discover- 
ing the ideal which naturally belongs to him- 
self, and in so dealing with the facts and cir- 
cumstances in which his lot is cast, as to 
reconcile by a true adjustment his inward 
aspiration and his outward surroundings. 

If, then, it be true that every man must 
have an ideal of some sort, and that this, be 
it base or lofty, rules his whole being, the 
Culturists tell us that it is the business of 
culture to v/aken men to the consciousness of 
some ideal, and to set before them true and 
lofty standards ; for the young especially to 
open up, through the manifold obstructions 
of sense and outward things, avenues by 



24 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

which the soul may catch some glimpse of the 
true beautj^, the real good, ^' of that light 
which being compared with the hght is found 
before it, more beautiful than the sun, and 
above all the orders of the stars." ^ 

They further tell us that it is the business 
of culture not only to set before men the vis- 
ion, but to impart to them the cunning hand 
which shall impress on outward things the 
pattern of the things seen in the mount. 
This culture does, by training them in the 
best knowledge of the time, by imbuing them 
with as much of the sciences and arts as they 
can take in and use. Without such practical 
training of the faculties and the hand, a man, 
however true his ideal, will become a mere 
dreamer, powerless to effect anything. And 
life is so complex, the materials we have to 
deal with so various and intractable, that it 
needs long and severe discipline of the facul- 
ties to give a man the chance of working his 
way towards his ideal through the numberless 
hindrances that surround him. 

We see, then, that culture, according to 
the claim put in for it by its most ardent ad- 
vocates, is said to do two things : first, it sets 
before a man a high ideal end to aim at, 
1 Note I. 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 25 

which shall enter into and control his life ; 
secondly, it trains all the faculties, all the in- 
ward powers and outward instruments, — 
hand, eye, ear, — so as to enable him in some 
measure to realize that ideal end, and over- 
come the obstructions that lie between him 
and it. Such is the claim which is put in by 
the Culturists. And, after what I liave said 
at the commencement, you will believe that 
I shall not gainsay it. True as far as it 
goes, it is, however, far enough from being 
an adequate account of the whole matter. 

Before quitting this subject, let me but add 
one word in defense of those who speak of 
ideal aims. Very practical or cynical persons 
are fond of sneering at these. They make 
merry, as it is easy to do, with those who, in 
their phrase, keep vaporing about ideals. 
What have we, or most men, they say, to do 
with ideals ? Let us leave them to the rapt 
poet, the recluse thinker, the dreaming vis- 
ionary. It is the actual, the hard facts of 
life that we have to deal with ; to push our 
way in the world, maintain the struggle for 
existence, immersed in the tangible and ma- 
terial, hemmed in by, often nigh crushed be- 
neath, imperious circumstances. Enough 
for us if we can battle through them, without 



26 THE AIM OF CULTURE. 

being overpowered. Ideals ! let us leave 
them to those who have wealth and leisure ; 
they are among the luxuries, not the necessi- 
ties of life. For us we have enough to do to 
make something of the real. 

To make something of the real ! Yes, 
that's it. But how are we to make anything 
of the actual unless we have some aim to direct 
our efforts, some clew to guide us through its 
labyrinths ? And this aim, this clew, is just 
what is meant by the Ideal. You may dislike 
the word and reject it, but the thing you can- 
not get rid of, if you would live any life above 
that of brutes. An aim, an ideal of some 
sort, be it material or spiritual, you must 
have, if you have reason, and look before 
and after. True, no man's life can be wholly 
occupied with the ideal, not even the poet's 
or the philosopher's. Each man must ac- 
quaint himself with numberless details ; must 
learn the stuff" that the world is made of, and 
how to deal, with it. Even Phidias and 
Michael Angelo must study the nature of the 
rough block they have to hew. Not even 
the most ethereal being can live wholly upon 
sunbeams, and most lives are far enough 
removed from the sunbeams. Yet sunshine, 
light, is necessary for every man. And 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION, 27 

though most are immersed in business, or 
battlina; all life throuo-h with touo-h conditions, 
yet, if we are not to sink into mere selfish 
animalitv, we must needs have some master 
light to guide us ; " somethiug that may 
dwell upon the heart, though it be not named 
upon the tongue.'^ For if there be some- 
times a danger lest the youno; enthusiast, 
through too great devotion to an abstract 
ideal, should essay the impossible, and break 
himself acrainst the walls of destiny that hem 
him in, far more common is it for men to be 
so crushed under manhood's burdens, that 
they abandon all the hio;h aims of their youth, 
and submit to be driven like gin-horses — 

"Round the daiiy scene 
Of sad subjection, and of sick routine." 

The Culturists, then, speak truly when they 
tell us that every man must have some ideal, 
and that it is all-important that, while the 
mind is plastic, each should form some high 
aim which is true to his own nature, and 
true to the truth of things. It has been well 
said that youth is the season when men are 
engaged in forming their ideals. In mature 
age they are engaged in trying to impress 
them on the actual world. And culture pro- 
fesses to effect that men shall fix their aims 



28 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

high and true, and be equipped with the 
knowledge, skill, aptitudes, required for car- 
rying them out successfully. 

But the question now occurs, which has 
probably suggested itself ere now to some 
who hear me. What does religion say to all 
this ? We had thouo-ht it had been relimon 
which set forth the ends of life, and supplied 
the motives and the power for striving to- 
wards them. But now it seems that there is 
some rival power, called Culture, which claims 
for itself these architectonic functions which 
we had hitherto thouo;ht belono;ed of rio;ht 
to Religion. In the language of Aristotle, 
which of these two is the architectonic or 
master-art which prescribes to all the other 
arts and occupations of life their functions, as 
the master-builder prescribes their duties to 
his workmen ? Or are Culture and Religion 
really rival powers ? are they to be regarded 
as in any way antagonistic to each other? 
And if not, what are their mutual relations ? 
in what way do they meet and act on each 
other ? 

This is the question with which I shall 
have to deal more or less, now leaving it, 
now returning to it, throughout these 
Lectures. 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 29 

One thing is obvious, that, however much 
the end of life, as laid down by religion, may 
diverge from the view taken by culture, yet 
religion will have nothing to say against the 
assertion that life must be ruled by an aim 
which shall be ideal. For what can be more 
ideal than that which religion sets before us ? 
'' Seek ye first the kingdom of God." ^' Be 
ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is 
perfect." 

Let this, then, be clearly understood, that 
whether we look at life from the side of 
Culture or from that of Religion, in either 
case we must be guided by an ideal light, 
which is, indeed, the only real and powerful 
guidance. 

Now as to the relation in which these two 
stand to each other : — 

Culture proposes as its end the carrying 
of man's nature to its highest perfection, the 
developing to the full all the capacities of our 
humanity. If, then, in this view, humanity 
be contemplated in its totality, and not in 
some partial side of it. Culture must aim at 
developing our humanity in its Godward as- 
pect, as well as its mundane aspect. And it 
must not only recognize the religious side of 
humanity, but if it tries to assign the due 



80 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

place to each capacity, and assign to all the 
capacities their mutual relations, it must con- 
cede to the Godward capacities that para- 
mount and dominating place which rightfully 
belongs to them, if they are recognized at all. 
That is, Culture must embrace Religion, and 
end in it. 

Again, to start from the side or point of 
view of religion : — The ground of ail relig- 
ion, that which makes it possible, is the rela- 
tion in which the human soul stands to God. 
This relation is the root one, and determines 
what a man really is. As a Kempis says, 
"What thou art in the sight of God, that 
thou truly art." The practical recognition 
of this relation as the deepest, most vital, 
most permanent one, as that one w^hich em- 
braces and regulates all others, this is relig- 
ion. And each man is religious just in pro- 
portion as he does practically so recognize 
this bond, w^hich binds him to his Maker. 

If, then, religion be this, it must embrace 
culture : first, because it is itself the culture 
of the highest capacity of our being; and 
secondly, because, if not partial and blind, it 
must acknowledge all the other capacities of 
man's nature as gifts ^vhich God has given. 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 31 

and given that man may cultivate them to 
the utmost, and elevate them bv connectino; 
them with the thought of the Giver, and the 
purpose for which He gave them. 

We see, then, that religion, w^hen it has its 
perfect work, must lead on to culture. If 
this view be true, culture and religion are 
not, w^hen rightly regarded, two opposite 
powers, but they are as it were one line with 
two opposite poles. Start from the manward 
pole, and go along the line honestly and 
thoroughly, and you land in the divine one. 
Start from the divine pole, and carry out all 
that it implies, and you land in the manward 
pole, or the perfection of humanity. Ideally 
considered, then, culture must culminate in 
religion, and religion must expand into cul- 
ture. So it ought to be, — so, we sometimes 
imagine, it might be. But it requires little 
knowledge of history, and a very small ob- 
servation of men, to convince us that so it 
has not been in the past, so it is not now. 
Goethe, the high-priest of culture, loathes 
Luther, the preacher of righteousness. The 
earnestness and fervor of the one disturb and 
offend the calm serenity which the other 
loves. And Luther, likely enough, had he 
seen Goethe, would have done him but scant 
justice. 



32 THE AIM OF CULTURE. 

Mr. Arnold figures to himself Virgil and 
Shakespeare accompanying the Puritan Pil- 
grim Fathers on their voyage to America, 
and asks if the two poets would not have 
found the company of such men intolerable. 
If, however, the two poets instead of the Pu- 
ritan exiles had been thrown into the society 
of St. Paul and St. John, w^ould they have 
found their societv much more to their 
mind ? These sharp contrasts suggest some 
questions not easy to answer. It is no use 
smoothing them over by commonplaces about 
the one-sidedness of all men, and the limita- 
tions of our nature. When, however, we 
think over it, we can see some reasons which 
make the combination of the two things dif- 
ficult, so diflScult that it is only in a few, and 
these rarely gifted natures, that they have 
both coexisted in any high degree. Take the 
case of a man who has not had a religious 
home and childhood, but has begun with cul- 
ture. It is easy to see that such a one, 
when from his scientific investigations and 
philosophical reasonings, or aesthetic ideals, he 
turns his thoughts for the first time towards 
religious truth, will come in contact with an 
order of things that is alien to the ways of 
thought and repugnant to the modes of feel- 



ITS DELATION TO RELIGION. 33 

ing engendered in him by culture. The 
practical thought of God is something so dif- 
ferent from the apprehension of any truth of 
science or philosophy, and puts the mind 
into such a different posture from any to 
which these have accustomed it, that the 
mere man of culture will feel that for such 
contemplation he either requires new facul- 
ties, or must make a new use of the old, and 
likely enough he will give it up in despair. 
Again, the account which Christianity gives 
of human nature, even if we avoid all exao;- 
geration, is not one that readily falls in with 
the habits either of the scientific or of the 
poetic mind. The mystery of evil, as its 
working is described in the Epistle to the 
Romans, and man's need of redemption, his 
helplessness until succored by a strength 
higher than his own : these are truths that 
do not easily find a place in any system of 
ordered evolution such as science delights to 
trace, — rather they are yawning gaps that 
come in to bafile and perplex all the scien- 
tific methods. Nor are they less alien to im- 
aginations that have been fed on the great 
poetic creations, for these lend themselves 
readily to the pantheistic idea of evil as a 
necessary step on the road to good, rather 

3 



34 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

than to the Christian view of sin. In short, 
the transition from the objects on which cul- 
ture dwells to those on which religion dwells 
is the passage from a religion in which hu- 
man thought, human effort, human self-de- 
velopment, are paramount, to a region in 
which man's own powers are entirely subor- 
dinate, in which recipiency, not self-activity, 
is the primary law of life, and in w^hich the 
chief worker is not man, but God, 

To put the matter forcibly", let me quote 
the words of a venerable writer still living : ^ 
" It is impossible," he says, " to look into 
the Bible with the most ordinary attention 
without feeling that we have got into a moral 
atmosphere quite different from that which 
we breathe in the world, and in the world's 
literature. In the Bible God is presented as 
doing everything, and as being the cause and 
end of everything ; and man appears only as 
he stands related to God, either as a revolted 
creature or as the subject of Divine grace. 
Whereas in the world, and in the books which 
contain the history of the world, according to 
its own judgment, man appears to do every- 
thing, and there is as little reference to God 
as if there were no such Beino; in the uni- 



verse." 



1 See Note II. 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 35 

These words point to a great but real op- 
position, to a vast hiatus not to be gainsaid 
or passed by, — the difference between the 
point of view of the Bible and of ordinary lit- 
erature, — the opposed aspects that life wears, 
according as we accept the rehgious interpre- 
tation of the world or the secular interpreta- 
tion of it. No doubt it is the great end of 
Christianity to heal this long-standing discord, 
to do away the ancient opposition between 
things divine and things human, to reconcile 
all true human learning, not less than human 
hearts, to God. That in every age Christian- 
ity has done so in some measure, history is 
the witness. That it has yet much to do, 
vast tracts of thought to reclaim and spiritu- 
alize, before the reconciliation is complete, if 
it is ever to be complete, — this is but too 
apparent. 

It may help to make the whole matter 
clearer, if, before concluding, we cast our eye 
backward to the sources whence first issued 
these two great streams of tendency that 
long since, more or less combined, and now 
compose the main current of civihzation. 

Of culture in its intellectual side, of those 
mental gifts which have educated the civil- 



36 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

ized world, and moulded thought to what it 
is, Greece, you all know, is the birth-land. 
It was there that these gifts sprang to light, 
and were matured before they were spread 
abroad and became the inheritance of the na- 
tions. The first father, the Apostle of civil- 
ization, as he has been called, was Homer. 
For several centuries the poems of the old 
minstrel floated about orally, intrusted only to 
men's memories. But when the Athenian 
prince gathered together his scattered frag- 
ments, and reduced them to writing, '' the 
vagrant ballad-singer " was, as it were, en- 
throned as the king of minstrelsy, and " in- 
vested with the office of forming the young 
mind of Greece to noble thoughts and bold 
deeds." ^ Henceforth to be read in Homer 
became the first requirement of an educated 
gentleman. And as time went on there fol- 
lowed in due succession all the order of the 
poets. Didactic, lyric, tragic^ comic poetry, 
each of these in Greece first came to light, 
and there, too, found its consummate form. 
Hesiod, Pindar, ^schylus, Sophocles, Aris- 
tophanes, — these followed in the train of 
Homer, and, though subordinate to him, be- 
mme likewise the teachers of the Greek 
1 Note III. 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 37 

* 

youth. On poetry followed history, — with 
Herodotus for the father of pictorial, Thu- 
cydides of philosophic, history. And as his- 
tory came from the consciousness of political 
life, so also did oratory, which was One of its 
younger products. 

And when all these intellectual forms had 
nearly completed themselves, last of all, as 
the maturest creation of Hellenic mind, came 
philosophy, — philosophy with its countless 
names and variety of phases, but with Socra- 
tes, Plato, and Aristotle standing in the fore- 
front, for all time '' the masters of those who 
know." 

No one who looks back on that marvelous 
fertility, that exhaustless variety of the rarest 
gifts of thought, the product of so small a land 
and so few centuries, the wonder of which 
only increases the more we contemplate it, 
can believe that it was intended to begin and 
end in the land which gave it birth, — that 
these words of savers and thinkers had ful- 
filled the end they were designed for when 
they had delighted or instructed only the 
men who first heard them. No; the idea 
must force itself on every one who really re- 
flects on it that this inexhaustible richness 
was given to Athens, that she might be the 



38 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

intellectual mother of the world, — that her 
thoughts might be a possession for all ages. 

Just as we see that the long geological 
epoch, which stored up the vast coal meas- 
ures, was evidently preparing those material 
resources which were not only to minister to 
the physical comfort, but to create the phys- 
ical civilization of great nations yet to be, 
even so this exuberance of intellectual 
wealth seems, in the design of the world, 
to have been so marvelously matured in 
Greece, that it might be as a treasure-house 
from which not so much the Greeks them- 
selves as all future generations might be 
schooled, elevated, and refined. 

With regard to the action of Hellenic 
thought, however, two remarks are to be 
made. The first is, it was not so much im- 
mediately and directly, as by creating Latin 
literature and reaching modern thought 
through the medium of the Latin language, 
that Greece has propelled European civiliza- 
tion. It was not till the revival of letters in 
the fifteenth century that Greek thought 
came face to face with the modern world, 
and infused itself directly into western cul- 
ture. Of course it is an old remark that in 
literature Rome produced little original, and 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION, 39 

mainly imitated Greece. But when we look 
at it, there is more in this than at first 
appears. It is, as has been well said, " a 
proof of the sort of instinct which has guided 
the course of civilization. The world was to 
have certain intellectual teachers, and no 
others. Homer and Aristotle, with the poets 
and philosophers who circle round them, 
were to be the schoolmasters of all genera- 
tions ; and therefore the Latins, falling into 
the law on which the world's education was 
to be carried on, so added to the classical 
library as not to reverse or interfere with 
what had been already determined." 

The second remark! would offer is, that 
whatever else Greece has given to the world, 
however much she may have educated men 
to clear and subtle thought, and to the deli- 
cate sense of beauty, and to the highest forms 
of abstract thinking, it is not Greece that has 
awakened and satisfied the religious longings 
of humanity. Indeed, it is a very noteworthy 
fact, that before Hellenic thought became 
cosmopolitan, it dropped the native ethnic 
religion, and left it behind in the place of its 
birth as a residuum that could not live else- 
where. What was purely intellectual, that 
was catholic and fitted for all time ; what 



40 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

was religious, that was local, temporary, and 
doomed to perish. Connected with this fact 
is the divorce in Greece between religion and 
morality, in all but a very few of her highest 
minds. Indeed, it is observable how, as the 
moral sense of the Hellenic race grew deeper 
and wider, the orimnal relimon of Homer 
fell off from it as felt to be inadequate. 

Greece, then, was the source of intellectual 
culture ; but we must look to a remoter and 
more eastern land to find the original source 
of relio;ious knowledo-e. " Jerusalem," as 
has been said, '' is the fountain-head of re- 
ligious knowledge to the world, as Athens is 
of secular." The ancient world contained 
these two, and only these two, centres of 
illumination, separate and independent, to 
which the modern world is indebted for the 
highest gifts of human lejirning and the life- 
giving powers of divine grace. Greece, 
while it enlio-htened and delicrlited the intel- 
lect, left the conscience and spirit of man un- 
satisfied. To meet the wants of these, to 
reach man in the deepest seats of his being, 
it required something more inward, more 
penetrating, more vital. It required the sim- 
ple yet profound truths of that revelation 
which began and was perfected in Judaea. 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION. 41 

With recrard to the teachino; of that re vela- 
tion, I will note but two things. One is, 
that to the Hebrew mind the thought of mo- 
rality and the thought of God were never sep- 
arate, but were ever essentially at one. That 
w^ord belongs to the oldest record of the He- 
brew^ race, '' Shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right ? " And this interpenetration 
of morahty and religion, which pervades the 
teachings alike of lawgiver, psalmist, and 
prophet, finds its perfect consummation in 
Him in wdiom the revelation culminated and 
closed. The other thing I would remark is 
the striking fact that it was from amidst a 
people hitherto the most isolated and exclu- 
sive of all knowm peoples, — a nation shut 
off from all the world by the most narrow 
restrictions and prejudices, — that there 
arose, in all the force of living conviction, a 
faith the most unrestricted, the most expan- 
sive, and all-embracing which the world had 
hitherto known or ever can know. 

When we think on these two separate 
centres of illumination, — ■ " the grace stored 
in Jerusalem, and the gifts Avhich radiate 
from Athens," — the thought cannot but 
occur. How do these two stand related to 
each other ? In that expression, " when the 



42 THE AIM OF CULTURE. 

fullness of the time was come," no thoughtful 
student of history can fail to recognize, 
along with the preparations that had gone on 
in Judaea, some reference to the work which 
Greece and Rome had done on the earth. 
You remember that superscription which 
w^as written in letters of Greek, and Latin, 
and Hebrew. That superscription seems to 
symbolize the confluence of powers which 
thenceforward were to rule the minds of 
men. That central grace and truth which 
came by Jesus Christ was to go forth into 
the world embodied in the lano;uao;e which 
had been long since fashioned by Homer and 
Plato, and that Hellenic tongue in its last 
decadence was to be made " the vehicle of 
higher truths and a holier inspiration than 
had ever haunted the dreams of bard or sage 
in old Achaia." And not less, in order that 
the glad tidings might spread abroad, was 
needed the political action 'of Rome, The 
world had first to be leveled down into one 
vast empire, and the stern legionaries, — 
" those massive hammers of the whole earth," 
— as they paved the great highways from 
the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules, 
were, though they knew it not, ful fillers of 
Hebrew prophecy, and preparing the way 



ITS RELATION TO RELIGION, 43 

of the Lord and making straight in the desert 
a highway for our God. So it was that Ju- 
daea, Greece, and Rome combined to make 
possible the new creation. Not in Judsea 
alone, but in the other two countries also, 
there had been going on, as has been well 
said, '' a moral and spiritual expansion, which 
rendered the world more capable of appre- 
hending the Gospel than it would have been 
in any earlier age." If there is anything 
providential at all in human history, this con- 
vergence of influences to bring about '' the 
fullness of the time " must be regarded as 
Such. 

The agencies which in those past ages 
combined to form Christendom have their 
points of contact and cohesion ; they have 
also their points of divergence and repulsion. 
During some epochs the harmony of their 
working has been conspicuous ; in other 
epochs, for a time at least, they have seemed 
rather to be divergent. But however much, 
in certain turning-points of human thought, 
these great influences, or their modern repre- 
sentatives, may seem for a time to collide, 
and though in the collision many individuals 
may suffer grievous loss, one cannot but be- 
lieve that out of the conflict of earnest 



44 THE AIM OF CULTURE, 

thougli one-sided convictions, there will at 
length arise, as there has done in past ages, 
a revivified faith, a harmony of elements, 
more simple, more all-embracing, more spir- 
itual than any that has yet been. 



i 



LECTUEE n. 

THE SCIEXTIFIC THEORY OF CULTURE. 

I ENDEAVORED in my last lecture to bring 
before you the meaning of culture as under- 
stood by those who most warmly advocate it, 
the ends it proposes, the means by which it 
seeks those ends. There was less need to 
dwell at length on the nature of religion, as 
this, we may assume, is more commonly un- 
derstood. We saw that these two, though 
distinct in their nature, and starting from 
different points of view, are not really op- 
posed. For culture, if thoroughly and con- 
sistently carried out, must lead on to religion, 
that is, to the cultivation of the spiritual and 
heavenward capacities of our nature. And 
religion, if truthful and wise, must expand 
into culture, must urge men who are under 
its power to make the most of all their 
capacities, not only for the worth of these 
capacities in themselves, but because they are 
gifts of God, and given for this purpose, that 



46 TEE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

we may carefully cultivate them. And no 
doubt culture, pursued under such a feeling, 
would acquire a new worth ; it would be 
purified from egotism and unhealthy self- 
consciousness, would be informed by a more 
chastened, reverential spirit, which would 
add to it a new excellence. If we could 
but attain and keep the highest and truest 
point of view, and regard " humanity as 
seen in the light of God," all good gifts of 
nature and of art would fall into their right 
place, for they would assume in our thoughts 
that place which they have in the creative 
thought of the Giver. 

So it is in truth ; but so we saw it has not 
been in fact. We saw that often it has hap- 
pened that culture has taken account of all 
man's capacities but the highest, and so has 
become Godless ; on the other hand, that 
often sincere relio-ion has thou2:ht it was 
honoring things spiritual by depreciating the 
cultivation of the lower but yet essential ca- 
pacities of man, and so has narrowed itself, 
and cut itself off from reality. 

I then glanced at the two historical centres 
of illumination, from the one of which the 
world had received its spiritual, from the 



OF CULTURE. 47 

other its intellectual light, and I noted how 
these two had providentially combined to 
bring in the new creation of Christianity. 
At the close I was led to remark that while 
these two mighty influences had combined, 
and doubtless were intended to combine, to 
bless mankind, one could not but perceive 
that as they contain elements which draw to 
each other and tend to coalesce, so they con- 
tain other elements wliich may tend, and at 
certain epochs have tended to divergence, or 
even to collision. 

Such an epoch was that wakening of the 
European mind in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, known as the revival of letters. 
When the fall of Constantinople had sent 
crowds of Greek exiles westward, bearing 
with them their Greek learning into Italy, — 
when the printing press, newly invented, 
was pouring forth year by year fresh editions 
of Greek and Latin classics, — when the 
discovery of another hemisphere had opened 
a boundless horizon for enterprise and civili- 
zation, — the minds of men, long hide-bound 
in scholastic logic and theology, sprang for- 
ward, as from a musty prison-house, into a 
fresh world of light. In Florence, then the 
fountain-head of the revived learning, the 



48 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

recoil from the outworn paths drove many 
minds not only from scholasticism, but even 
from Christianity. They fancied they could 
find something better, wider, more human in 
a semi-pagan philosophy. Intoxicated, as 
was not unnatural, by the fascinations of 
the new learning, they imagined that in it 
alone they had found an all-sufficient por- 
tion. 

Again, about the beginning of last century, 
the same tendency to discard religion, at least 
revealed religion, and to make the products 
of human learning take its place, set in, 
thouo;h in another form. After the relio;ious 
wars, as they are called, of the seventeenth 
century had been fouc^ht out ; *after the 
strong Puritan movement had spent itself, 
there came on a period of activ^e philosophiz- 
ing, but of philosophy unaccompanied by 
spiritual insight. As you read the works of 
Bishop Butler, you seem to hear the voice of 
a great and earnest thinker crying in the 
wilderness, and pleading with a suffering 
generation to believe that there is a deeper 
moral tendency in things than at first sight 
appears. It was a sifting, active-minded 
age, analyzing all things and believing in 



OF CULTURE. 49 

nothing which It could not analyze ; an age 
wholly over mastered by the understanding, 
judging according to sense. 

So it was for tlie greater part of last cen- 
tury. But Germany before the French Rev- 
ohition, and our own country after it, startled 
by the conclusions to which the Sense-phi- 
losophy had led m all departments of life, 
and the devastation it had made amono; all 
man's chiefest instincts and most cherished 
faiths, awoke to think over again those great 
problems which the past age had settled and 
dismissed so complacently. The human 
mind plunged down as It were to a deeper 
layer of thought and feehng than that which 
had satisfied the age of the Aufklarung, as it 
is called. The philosophy of Voltaire and 
Hume could hold it no lono;er. This recoil 
manifested itself in Germany by the rise of 
the Kantian philosophy and the succession of 
great idealistic systems that followed it. In 
this country it was seen in here and there an 
attempt at a deeper metaphysic than that of 
Locke and Hume, but much more in the in- 
creased depth and compass of the poetry and 
literature of the first fifty years of this cen- 
tury. Everywhere that literature is per- 
vaded by greater reach of thought, increased 
4 



50 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

tenderness, more reverence, finer aspiration. 
In most of its greater poets there is some- 
thing of the 

*' Tendebantque manus ripse ulterioris amore," — 

the stretching forth the hands in yearning 
for a farther shore. It is clear that when 
culture is in such a phase, it more readily 
allies itself with religion than when it is 
sense-bound, unenthusiastic, and analytic 
mainly of the more obvious phenomena. 

The years about 1840 may be taken as the 
time when the spiritual flood-tide had reached 
the full. It is always very difficult to esti- 
mate the age in which you are living, yet I 
think we seem to have come in during the 
last twenty years for the ebb of that spiritual 
wave. Wordsworth, in his day, complained 
that — 

" Plain living and high thinking are no more." 

Of our day it may be truly said that high liv- 
ing and plain thinking are the all in all. In 
an age of great material prosperity like the 
present, when the comforts and conveniences 
of physical life have greatly increased, and 
science is every day increasing them, this 
world is apt to seem in itself a " satisfying 



OF CULTURE. 61 

abode," quite irrespective of any liope be- 
yond. The spread of knowledge is doing so 
much to remove many of the surface ills of 
life, that vague and exaggerated hopes are 
apt to be fostered of what it may yet do for 
the healing of the deepest disorders. To 
minds that have got themselves intoxicated 
with notions of material progress, this world, 
as I have said, is apt to seem enough, and 
man to appear a satisfying object to himself 
quite apart from God. 

This tendency, I think, manifests itself, as 
in other things, so also in some theories of 
culture which have lately been propounded. 
In these we see the attempt made either to 
substitute for religion the last and highest 
results of knowledge and culture, or to bring 
religion down from its supremacy, and give 
the highest place to culture. 

The first view which I shall bring before 
you, and which wall occupy the rest of our 
time to-day, is that which is taken by the 
advocates of a rigorous and exclusively 
scientific culture, by those who would make 
the scientific method our only guide in life, 
not merely in things belonging to the phys- 
ical order, but not less in the highest con- 



52 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

cerns of the human spirit. As tendencies 
are best seen in an extreme instance, I shall 
take as the sample of this tendency an in- 
auo;ural lecture delivered about two years 
ago by Professor Huxley, at the South Lon- 
don Working Men's College, of which he 
was then President. It is entitled " A Lib- 
eral Education, and where to find it." There 
is this advantao;e in takino; the instance I 
haye chosen, that it presents in a strong and 
easily understood form a way of thinking 
which in less aggravated degree pervades 
very widely the intellectual atmosphere of 
our time. 

Mr. Huxley lays down as his first principle, 
that education, in its largest and highest 
sense, — the education not merely of schools 
and colleges, but that education which the 
human spirit is receiving uninterruptedly 
from birth till death, — that this process con- 
sists solely in learning the laws of nature, 
and trainino; one's self to obey them. And 
within the laws of nature which we have to 
learn he includes not only the physical laws, 
but also those moral laws which govern man 
and his ways. We must set ourselves there- 
fore to acquire a knowledge not only of the 
laws that regulate matter, but also of the 



OF CULTURE, 63 

moral laws of the universe. These moral 
laws Mr. Huxley holds to be as rigid and self- 
exacting as the physical laws appear to be. 
This view of the condition of our existence 
here, and of the part which man bears in it, 
Mr. Huxley sets forth in a startling, not to 
say daring, figure. '' Suppose it were per- 
fectly certain," he says, '-'• that the life and 
fortune of every one of us would, one day or 
another, depend upon his winning or losing 
a game of chess, don't you think that w^e 
should all consider it to be a primary duty 
to learn at least the name and moves of the 
pieces ; to have a notion of a gambit, and a 
keen eye for all the means of giving and 
getting out of a check ? Do you not think we 
should look with a disapprobation amounting 
to scorn upon the father who allowed his 
son, or the state which allowed its members, 
to grow up without knowing a pawn from a 
knight ? 

" Yet it is a very plain and elementary 
truth that the life, the fortune, and the hap- 
piness of every one of us, and, more or less, 
of those connected with us, do depend on 
our knowino; somethino; of the rules of a 
game infinitely more difficult and compli- 
cated than chess. It is a game which has 



54 THE SCIENTIFIC >fmORY '=? 



been played for untold ages, every man and 
woman of us being one of the two players 
in a game of his or her own. The chess- 
board is the world, the pieces are the phe- 
nomena of the universe, the rules of the 
game are what we call the laws of nature. 
The player on the other side is hidden from 
us. We know that his play is always fair, 
just, and patient. But we know, to our 
cost, that he never overlooks a mistake or 
makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. 
To the man Avho plays well the highest 
stakes are paid with that overflowing gener- 
osity with which the strong shows delight in 
strength. And one who plays ill is check- 
mated, without haste, but without remorse. 
My metaphor," Professor Huxley proceeds, 
" will remind some of you of the famous pic- 
ture in wliich Retzsch has depicted Satan play- 
ing chess with a man for his soul. Substitute 
for the mocking fiend in that picture a calm, 
strong angel, who is playing for love, as we 
say, and would rather lose than win, and I 
should accept it as an image of human life. 
Well, what I mean bv education is learninor 
the rules of this mighty game. In other 
words, education is the instruction of the intel- 
lect in the laws of nature, under which name 



OF CULTURE. 66 

I include not merely things and their forces, 
but men and their ways, and the fashioning 
of the affections and the will into an earnest 
and loving desire to move in harmony with 
these laws. For me education means neither 
more nor less than this." 

Now, painful as such a view of life must 
be to those who have been trained in a de- 
vouter school, it is well that we should look 
at it steadily, and try to understand and in- 
terpret it fairly. For it is a strong exposi- 
tion of a way of thinking very prevalent at 
the present time, which contains a peculiar 
fascination for many minds which, impatient 
of mystery, long, before all things, to attain 
and hold a clearly cut and systematic view. 
Definiteness is with them the test of truth, 
and this theory is so definite. However, let 
us first get Professor Huxley's whole state- 
ment. After setting it forth in that startling 
metaphor, he goes on to remark that nature 
begins the education of her children before 
the schools do, and continues it after. She 
takes men in hand as soon as they are born, 
and bemns to educate them. It is a rouo;h 
kind of education, one in which '' ignorance 
is treated like willful disobedience, incapacity 



56 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

is punished as a crime. It is not even a 
word and a blow, but the blow first without 
the word. It is left to you to find out why 
your ears are boxed." Now here man comes 
in, and takes up the process which nature 
has begun. And the aim of the artificial 
education which he gives in schools and col- 
leges is, or ought to be, to make good the 
defects in nature's methods, to prepare the 
child to receive nature's teaching, and to 
perfect it. All artificial education should be 
an anticipation of nature's education ; and a 
liberal education is an artificial education, 
one which has prepared a man, not only to 
escape nature's cuffs and blows, but to seize 
the rewards which she scatters no less 
lavishly. 

Then Mr^ Huxley gives us the following 
picture of what he conceives an educated 
man to be, as the result of a truly liberal 
education : — 

'' That man, I think, has had a liberal 
education who has been so trained in youth 
that his body is the ready servant of his will, 
and does with ease and pleasure all the work 
that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose 
intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with 
all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth 



OF CULTURE, 57 

working order ; ready, like a steam-engine, 
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin 
the gossamers as well as forge the anchors 
of the mind ; whose mind is stored with a 
knowledcre of the p-reat and fundamental 
truths of nature, and of the laws of her op- 
erations ; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full 
of life and fire, but whose passions are 
trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, 
the servant of a tender conscience ; who has 
learned to love all beautv, whether of nature 
or art, to hate all vileness, and to respect 
others as himself." 

This, whatever defects it may have, must 
be allowed to be, in many ways, a high ideal 
of education. Though it gives the chief 
promise to physical nature, and the scien- 
tific knowledge of it, yet the moral side of 
man is by no means forgotten. Mr. Hux- 
ley's ideally-educated man is to have his pas- 
sions trained to obey a strong will ; this will 
is to be the servant of a tender conscience ; 
he is to love beauty, to hate vileness, to re- 
spect others as himself. I would have you 
mark these thino-s, both that we mav do full 
justice to this view, and that we may the 
better understand the radical defect under 
which this whole theory of the world labors. 



68 TEE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

The first remark I would make is, that it 
takes for granted and founds on that theory 
of knowledge wdiich is known as pure and 
exclusive phenomenalism. Phenomenalism, 
you know, is that philosophy which holds 
that all existences, all possible objects of 
thought, are of two kinds only, external and 
internal phenomena ; or sensuous objects, 
such as color, shape, hardness, or groups of 
these, and the unsensuous ideas we have of 
sensuous objects. If, however, we add that 
there is a third kind of existence, or object 
of thoucrht, not included in either of those 
classes already named, but distinct and dif- 
ferent from these, namely, '' the unsensuous 
percipients, or spirits or egos, which we are 
each of us conscious that we ourselves are," 
tlien we turn the flank of this philosophy ; 
the inadequacy of the theory on which Mr. 
Huxley's view is based becomes at once ap- 
parent. But into this matter, pertinent 
though it is to our discussion, I will not 
enter. For, as I have already said, I wish 
in these lectures to enter as little as possible 
into questions purely metaphysical.^ 

The second remark I would make is, that 
this so-called scientific theory of life implies 

1 Note IV. 



OF CULTURE. 59 

that, thougli probably there is some power 
behind the phenomena, we have no means of 
ascertaining what mind and character it is of 
what purpose it has in creating and upholding 
this universe, if indeed it did create and does 
uphold it. I think I am not mishiterpreting 
Professor Huxley when I assume that he 
holds that our only means of conjecturing 
what is the mind of the great chess-player 
he fio-ures, lie in the scientific investio-ation 
of the facts of the world. Now, Hume long 
ago observed that if we judge merely by the 
facts of the world, we cannot infer any fixed 
character in the Divine Being ; but, if we in- 
fer character at all, it must be a two-sided, in- 
consistent character, partly benevolent, partly 
the contrary. 

As it has been well expressed, the theory 
comes to this, that " we, as intelligent, think- 
ing beings, find ourselves in a universe which 
meets us at all points with fixed laws, which 
encompass us about externally, and rule us 
also within ; fixed laws in the region of mat- 
ter, fixed laws in the region of mind ; that, 
therefore, knowledge for us is knowledge of 
laws, and can be nothing more ; and that 
wisdom in us is simply the skill to turn the 
knowledo-e of these laws to the best account, 



60 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

conformiiio; ourselves to them, and avaiHncr 
ourselves of them to appropriate to ourselves 
all the good they bring within our reach." 
A dreary prospect it would be if science 
really shut us up to this. Well may it be 
said that " men of keener hearts would be 
overpowered with despondency, and would 
even loathe existence, did they suppose them- 
selves under the mere operation of fixed laws, 
powerless to excite the pity or the attention 
of Him who appointed them." If, however, 
truth compelled us to admit it, we might try 
to bear up under it as best we could. But is 
it truth, or only a one-sided philosophy, that 
shuts us into this corner ? That it is not 
truth, the following considerations will, I hope, 
help to convince us. 

Observe, then, that while Professor Hux- 
ley's ideal man is to respect others as him- 
self, we are not told how or whence this most 
desirable habifc of mind is to be engendered. 
As a man of science. Professor Huxley is 
bound to take note of facts before all things, 
and to pass over none. In this very lecture 
he declares himself to have the o;reatest re- 
spect for all facts. Now, if there is one fact 
about human nature more certain than an- 
other, it is that men do not naturally re- 



OF CULTURE, 61 

spect the welfare of others, — rather that 
^' all men seek their own," not the things 
which belong to their fellow-men. It takes 
much moral discipHne to overcome this in- 
born propensity. Experience has, I believe, 
proved that it cannot be overcome except by 
a man being taken out of self as his centre, 
and finding a new centre out from and above 
himself, on which he can rest, to which all 
men stand eqimlly related, on which all can 
rest even as he. But Professor Huxley's 
theory supplies no such centre. If life were 
really such a game as he describes, — if men 
were once convinced that they had to do with 
only such a hidden chess-player as he pic- 
tures, would they not more than ever be 
driven inward, would not the natural selfish- 
ness he tenfold more concentrated and inten- 
sified ? 

To bring a man near the Christian require- 
ment, to love his neighbor as himself, takes 
the whole weight of Christian motive ; noth- 
ing less will avail. Assuredly the considera- 
tion of the evil consequences that will come 
to one's self from an opposite line of conduct, 
— which seems to be the moral theory rec- 
ognized in this lecture, — will be powerless 
to do so. We conclude, therefore, and say 



62 ■ THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

that the merely scientific view of Culture 
will not work for want of a lever. It postu- 
lates as one of its ingredients respect for 
others, yet it provides no means for securing 
the presence of that ingredient. 



Again, another element which it postulates 
is '' a vigorous will, the servant of a tender 
conscience." Now, a tender conscience, a 
true and quick sense of right, and the habit 
of obeying it, are not born in men ready- 
made and full formed. The elements, in- 
deed, of such a conscience lie in all men, but 
it requires long, careful, and delicate train- 
ing to bring them to maturity. Mr. Huxley 
has not told us what resources his theory sup- 
plies for maturing such a conscience. If the 
world were to come to recognize no other 
moral sanctions than those which utilitarian- 
ism insists on, would its morality continue to 
be even as high as it now is ? I think not. 
Certainly if men were once convinced that 
they were placed in such a world as Profes- 
sor Huxley pictures, — that their relations to 
its Ruler were such as he describes, — a ten- 
der conscience would be the last thing which 
would be engendered by such a conviction. 
We know how children grow up who are 



OF CULTURE. 63 

reared in homes where no kindness is, hut 
where the only rule is a word and a blow. 
The rule of terror, whether by parents or 
teachers, does not generally result in a ten- 
der conscience, but in hardness, suspicious- 
ness, deception. If the universe were 
believed to be such a home or school on a 
larger scale, would the result be different ? 
In other words, would a tender conscience 
be produced by the mere study of the laws of 
the game ? 

But again, let us suppose such a conscience 
to exist, and to be active in a man. Such a 
one, in proportion as the moral nature in him 
was true and strong, would desire the right 
to prevail in his own life and in the life of all 
men, — the desire of his heart would be to 
see the reign of righteousness established. 
How would such a maji feel, what would be 
his position, confronted with the Hidden 
Player, who moves the phenomena of the 
universe, in whose hand he knows his own 
life and the life of all men are ? — the' man 
loving right, and desiring to see it prevail, 
the Great Automaton with whom he has to 
do, beincr either reo;ardless of it, or affordino; 
to men no evidence that he does regard it. 



64 THE SCIEXTIFIC THEORY 

In such circumstances would not the tender 
conscience be a most inconvenient posses- 
sion ? Would not he who had it feel that 
it put him out of harmony with the universe 
in whicli lie was placed ? For his best en- 
deavors would find no sympathy, no response 
in the purpose of Him who rules tlie uni- 
verse. What would remain to such a man 
except either to rid himself of this sensitive 
conscience, which he found to be no help but 
rather a hindrance to successful playing of 
the game, or to desire to get out of a world, 
as soon as may be, in which the best part of 
his nature found itself strange and out of 
place. 

But ao^ain, this leads me to observe that 
Professor Huxley's theory either goes too far 
or not far enough, to be consistent. He 
ouo-ht either to have excluded moral consid- 
erations entirely, and to have confined his 
view wholly to visible and tangible issues ; 
or, if he once introduced moral elements into 
his theory, these necessitated his going fur- 
ther. Indeed, if we once brino; in the hio-her 
or spiritual issues of the game, these put 
an end to the aptness of the similitude, and 
destrov all its illustrative force. For con- 
sider. Each move in the game, that is, each 



OF CULTURE. 65 

human action, has two sides, — a double as- 
pect ; it has its visible and tangible result ; 
it has also its invisible and moral character.^ 
And this last, though not recognized by sense, 
and even when wholly disregarded by men, 
still exists as reallv as the seen result. If 
we regard the moves solely in their first as- 
pect, a man may contrive so to play the 
game of life as to secure a large amount of 
visible success, to get for himself most of the 
good things of this world, health, riches, rep- 
utation of a sort, long life, without any very 
tender conscience. To do this requires only 
worldly wisdom, only an average stock of 
market morality. For this kind of success a 
higher, more sensitive morality is so far from 
being necessary that it is actually a hin- 
drance. But look at the moves on their 
spiritual side, weigh success in a moral bal- 
ance, and our whole estimate is changed. 
He who is soonest checkmated, he who, 
j,udging by what is seen merely, comes by 
the earliest, most disastrous defeat, may in 
reality have won the highest moral victory. 
Such are they who in each agp have jeop- 
arded their lives for the truth, those who 
have been willing to lose life that they might 

1 Note V. 
5 



66 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

find it, who against the world have stood for 
right, and in that contest have sacrificed 
themselves, and by that sacrifice have made 
all future generations their debtors. They 
were losers, indeed, of the visible game, but 
they were winners of the invisible and 
spiritual one. They had for their reward 
not what the world calls success, but the 
sense that they were servants of the truth, 
doers of the right, and that in doing it they 
had the approval and sympathy of Him. with 
whom 

" A noble aim, 
Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed, 
In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed." 

This view of things, however, takes into ac- 
count a fact which Mr. Huxley has failed to 
recognize, that there is an open path between 
the soul and God. The thought of this re- 
lation, the sense of His approval, forms no 
part of the success which the mere worldly 
player aims at. But other m^n of finer 
spirit have, in the very crisis of earthly fail- 
ure, felt the sense of this approval to have 
been an over-payment for all they suffered. 

Indeed, the longer we reflect on the aim 
which Professor Huxley's theory assigns to 
human existence, the more will it be seen to 



OF CULTURE. 67 

contradict, I will not say the best aspirations, 
but the most indubitable facts of man's higher 
nature. If Hfe were indeed nothing more 
than such a game, who would be truly reck- 
oned the most successful players ? Not the 
select spirits of the race, but the men of 
merely average morahty, those whose guide 
in Hfe was mere prudence, a well-calculated 
regard to self-interest; while the nobler 
spirits, those who sought to raise themselves 
and others to purer heights of being, would 
find that they were mere irrelevant creatures. 
All that was best and purest in them would 
be objectless, an anomaly and disturbance, 
in such a universe.- For it would contain 
nothing which could so much as warrant 
their finer perceptions to exist. Or again, 
look at this other fact, or perhaps it is the 
same fact put in another light : there is at 
the core of all men something which the 
whole world of nature, of science and of art, 
is inadequate to fill. And this part of man is 
no mere adjunct of his nature, but his very, 
• most permanent, highest self. What this 
inmost personality craves is sympathy with 
something like itself, yet high above it, — a 
will consubstantial with our better will, yet 
transcending, supporting, controlling it. This 



68 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

longing IS, I believe, latent in all men, though 
they may not be aware of it. But in the 
best men it not only exists in latency, but 
is paramount, — the animating principle of 
their lives. Of them that ancient v^ord is 
literally true, " their soul is athirst for God." 
The desire to have their will conformed to 
to His will, the hope that they shall yet be 
brought into perfect sympathy with Him, is 
what in their estimate makes the chief good 
of existence. They believed that they could 
know something of the character of God, 
and that they might reasonably aspire to 
grow in likeness to that character. This be- 
lief has been the root out of which has grown, 
I will not say all, but certainly much of, the 
finest flower of morality that has bloomed on 
earth. It is not easy to believe that what 
was so true and excellent had its root in a 
delusion ; yet this is the conclusion to which 
the chess-playing theory, if true, would 
force us. 

But there is a further fact regarding these 
men which we must not pass over : they have 
left it on record that their seeking to know 
God and find rest in Him was not in vain, 
but that in proportion as they sought in 



OF CULTURE. 69 

sinorleness of will to know Him, not with the 
■anderstanding only, but with their whole 
spirit, they did really grow in that knowledge. 
They have told us that, darkly though they 
here saw, and imperfectly, yet the vision 
they had was better than anything else they 
knew of, that compared w4th it earthly suc- 
cess and merely secular knowledge seemed 
to them of but little moment. And as to 
the laws of nature, these, they have told us, 
had for them a new meaning and a higher 
value when they saw in them a discipline 
leading up to the knowledge of Him who 
ordained them, and as being in their order 
and marvelous adaptations a reflection of 
His wisdom and will. 

This is the witness they gave of them- 
selves, and the lives they lived and the 
works they did confirm that witness. Their 
lives and deeds, making allowance for human 
infirmity, were in keeping with w^hat they 
declared respecting themselves. With rea- 
son, I think, we may trust them, when they 
add that the things they did on earth they 
w^ere enabled to do by a strength which was 
not of themselves, but which, when they 
sought it from a source above themselves, 
they found. 



70 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

My examination of the theory which has 
to-day engaged us has led me to observe two 
things : — 

Firsts That of the moral elements of hu- 
man nature which that theory postulates, it 
gives no sufficient account ; it provides noth- 
ing which shall insure their presence. 

Secondly^ That it leaves out facts of man's 
nature which are as certain, though it may be 
not so apparent, as gravitation, or any other 
fact which science registers. These facts are 
indubitable ; and the truly scientific spirit 
would lead man to give heed to them, and 
ask what they really mean. The spiritual 
facts of human nature to which I have ad- 
verted, no doubt imply, as their support, 
other facts which are above nature, — an 
outcoming of the Divine will in a special 
way, manifesting itself among the phenomena 
it has made, for the purpose of reaching the 
human wills which are dependent on it. But 
this, and all the wonderful economy it im- 
plies, I have refrained from speaking of to- 
day, that I might fix attention all the more 
clearly on those moral facts which are part 
of our own exp erience, but which are apt to 
be disregarded in comparison with other 
facts more obvious, but not more real. 



OF CULTURE, 71 

In conclusion, let me note a mental bias 
against which persons, both of scientific and 
metaphysical turn, do well to be on their 
guard. Their habits of inquiry sometimes 
lead them to demand, in proof of things 
spiritual, a kind of evidence which the sub- 
ject does not admit, and to be insensible to 
the kind of evidence which it does admit. 
Habits of scientific investigation are excep- 
tional, and must always be confined to a few. 
Christianity is meant for all men. It makes 
its appeal, not to that in which men differ, 
but to that which they have in common, — to 
those primary instincts, sentiments, judg- 
ments which belong to all men as men. 
Therefore it is no unreasonable demand to 
make, that the man of science, when judging 
of the things of the spirit, shall leave his soli- 
tary eminence, and place himself among the 
sympathies and needs which he shares with 
all men, and judge of the claim which religion 
makes on him, not from the exceptional 
point of view which he shares only with a 
few, but from that ground which he occupies 
in common with his poorest, least scientific 
brothers. 

In asking this we are not asking that he 
should place his higher faculty in abeyance, 



72 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY 

and employ a lower in order to weigh and 
accept religious truth. The logical or scien- 
tific faculty, that by which we discern logical, 
mathematical, or scientific relations, is not 
the highest exercise of reason. The knowl- 
edge of the hio;hest thino-s, those which most 
deeply concern us, is not attained by mere 
intellect, but by the harmonious action of un- 
derstanding, imagination, feeling, conscience, 
will, — that is, of the Avhole man. This is rea- 
son in its hio;hest exercise, intellio-ence raised 
to its highest power ; and it is to this exer- 
cise of reason we are called in apprehending 
the things of God. 

It is well that we should be convinced, on 
rational grounds, that science simply as sci- 
ence can never reach God. To him who 
insists on a purely scientific solution of the 
problem of man's life and destiny, and who 
will accept no other, there is no solution; 
and for this reason : the highest concerns of 
humanity, the greatest objects with which 
the soul has to do, cannot even be appre- 
hended by the scientific family. If appre- 
hended at all, it must be by the exercise of 
quite another side of our being*than that which 
science calls into play. " No telescope will 
enable us to see God. No finest microscope 



OF CULTURE, 73 

will make Him visible, in the act of working. 
No chemistry, no study of physical forces, no 
search after the one primary force, can bring 
us one ' hand-breadth nearer God.' Science 
in the abeyance of our spiritual nature at- 
tains not to God. No scientific study of the 
phenomena which imply a reign of law could 
ever have issued in the discoverv of the 
kingdom of God ; but neither can it issue in 
any discovery that contradicts thaf kingdom." 
These are the words of Dr. M'Leod Camp- 
bell, whose writings I have found peculiarly 
suggestive on the questions I have been dis- 
cussing. 

Therefore it is of no use — indeed, it is a 
grave error — when those who contend for 
the religious view of the world attempt to 
prove to men of science, as if found in sci- 
ence, that which merely scientific faculty will 
never find there, but which has been brought 
thither by their faith. Indeed, scientific 
men, who are also religious, will be the first 
to acknowledge that their faith in God they 
did not get from science, but from quite 
another source ; although this faith, when 
once possessed, invested with a new meaning, 
and illumined with a higher light, all that 
science taught them. 



LECTUEE ni. 

THE LITERARY THEORY OF CULTURE. 

A TRUE poet and brilliant critic of the 
present time, admired by all for his fine and 
cultivated genius, and to me endeared by 
never-fading memories of early companion- 
ship, has identified his name with a very 
different view of culture from that which I 
brought before you the last time I addressed 
you. If Professor Huxley's is the exclu- 
sively scientific view of culture, Mr. Arnold's 
may be called the literary or aesthetic one. 
In discussing the former theory, I attempted 
to examine it in the light of facts, and to 
avoid applying to it any words which its au- 
thor might disown. For mere appeal to 
popular prejudice should have no place in 
discussions about truth, and he who has re- 
course to that weapon in so far w^eakens the 
cause he advocates. If, however, I was con- 
strained to call attention to some not unim- 
portant facts of human nature which that 
theory fails to account for, this should be re- 



THE LITERARY THEORY OF CULTURE. 75 

garded not as appeal to unreasoning preju- 
dice, but as a statement of omitted facts. 
But whatever might be said of Professor 
Huxley's view, as leaving out of siglit the 
spiritual capacities and needs of man, the 
same objection cannot equally be urged 
against Mr. Arnold's theory of culture. He 
fully recognizes religion as an element, and 
a very important one, in his theory ; only we 
may see cause to differ from him in the place 
which he assigns to it. Though I believe 
Mr. Arnold's theory to be defective when 
taken as a total philosophy of life, yet so 
large-minded and generous are the views it 
exhibits, so high and refined are the motives 
it urges for self-improvement, that I believe 
no one can seriously and candidly consider 
what he says without deriving good from it. 
As a recent writer has truly said, — '' The 
author of this theory deserves much praise 
for having brought the subject before men's 
minds, and forced a little unwilling examina- 
tion on the ' self-complacent but very uncul- 
tured British public' " 

Many who now hear me may have proba- 
bly read in Mr. Arnold's several works all 
his pleadings for culture. To these the re- 



76 THE LITERARY THEORY 

capitulation of his views which I shall give 
may be somewhat tedious, but 1 hope those 
who know his writings will bear with me 
while I briefly go over his views, for the sake 
of those of my hearers who may be less ac- 
quainted with them. 

Those who were present at my first lec- 
ture may remember that I tried to describe 
what is meant by culture. That description 
was not identical with the one I have now to 
give, but, though different in form, the two 
will not, I believe, conflict. 

In Mr. Arnold's view, the aim of culture 
is not merely to render an intelligent being 
more intelligent, to improve our capacities to 
the uttermost, but, in words which he bor- 
rows from Bishop Wilson, '' to make reason 
and the kingdom of God prevail." It is im- 
pelled not merely by the scientific desire to 
see things as they are, but rather by the 
moral endeavor to know more and more the 
universal order, which seems intended in the 
world, that we may conform to it ourselves, 
and make others conform to it; in short, that 
we may help to make the will of God pre- 
vail in us and around i^s. In this, he says, 



OF CULTURE, 77 

is seen the moral, social, beneficent nature 
of culture, that while it seeks the best knowl- 
edge, the highest science that is to be had, it 
seeks them in order to make them tell on 
human life and character. 

The aim of culture, therefore, is the per- 
fection of our human nature on all its sides, 
in all its capacities. First, it tries to deter- 
mine in what this perfection consists, and, in 
order to solve this question, it consults the 
manifold human experience that has ex- 
pressed itself in such diverse ways, through- 
out science, poetry, philosophy, history, as 
well as throuo;h relimon. 

And the conclusion which culture reaches 
is, Mr. Arnold holds, in harmony with the 
voice of religion. For it places human per- 
fection in an internal condition of soul, in the 
growth and predominance of our humanity 
proper, as distinguished from our animalityl 

Again, it does not rest content with any 
condition of soul, however excellent, but 
presses ever onwards to an ampler growth, 
to a gradual harmonious expansion of those 
gifts of thought and feeling which make the 
peculiar dignity, wealth and happiness of hu- 
man nature. Not a having and resting, but 
a growing and becoming, is the true charac- 
ter of perfection as culture conceives it. 



78 TEE LITERARY THEORY 

Again, in virtue of that bond of brother- 
hood which binds all men to each other, 
whether they will it or not, this perfection 
cannot be an isolated individual perfection. 
Unless the obligation it lays on each man to 
consider others as well as himself is recog- 
nized, the perfection attained must be a 
stunted, ignoble one, far short of true per- 
fection. 

In all these three considerations the aim 
of culture, Mr. Arnold thinks, coincides with 
the aim of religion. 

Firsts in that it places perfection not in 
any external good, but in an internal condi- 
tion of soul, — " The kingdom of God is 
within you." 

Secondly^ in that it sets before men a con- 
dition not of having and resting, but of grow- 
ino; and becomino- as the true aim, — '' For- 
getting those things which are behind, and 
reaching forth unto those things which are 
before." 

Thirdly^ in that it holds that a man's per- 
fection cannot be self-contained, but must 
embrace the good of others equally with his 
own, and as the very condition of his own, — 
"Look not every man on his own things, 
but every man also on the things of others." 



OF CULTURE. 79 

t 

These three notes belong alike to the per- 
fection which culture aims at, and to that 
which religion enjoins. 

But there is a fourth note of perfection as 
conceived by culture, in which, as Mr. Ar- 
nold thinks, it transcends the aim of religion. 
" As an harmonious expansion of all the 
powers which make the beauty and worth 
of human nature," Mr. Arnold holds that it 
" goes beyond religion, as religion is gen- 
erally conceived among us." For religion, 
Mr. Arnold thinks, aims at the cultivation of 
some, and these, no doubt, the highest pow- 
ers of the soul, at the expense, even at the 
sacrifice, of other powers, which it regards as 
lower. So it falls short of that many-sided, 
even-balanced, all-embracing, totality of de- 
velopment which is the aim of the highest 
culture. 

Mark well this point, for, though I cannot 
stop to discuss it now, I must return to it 
after I have set before you Mr. Arnold's 
view in its further bearings. 

After insisting, then, that culture is the 
study of perfection, harmonious, all-embrac- 
ing, consisting in becoming something rather 



80 THE LITERARY THEORY 

than in having something, in an inward con- 
dition of soul rather than in anv outward cir- 
cumstances, Mr. Arnold goes on to show how 
hard a battle culture has to fight in this 
country, with how many of our strongest 
tendencies, our most deep-rooted characteris- 
tics, it comes into direct, even violent collis- 
ion. The prominence culture gives to the 
soul, the inward and spiritual condition, as 
transcending all outward goods put together, 
comes into conflict with our worship of a me- 
chanical and material civilization. The so- 
cial aspirations it calls forth for the general 
elevation of the human family conflict with 
our intense individualism, our " every man 
for himself." The totality of its aim, the 
harmonious expansion of all human capaci- 
ties, contradicts our inveterate one-sidedness, 
our absorption each in his own one pursuit. 
It conflicts, above all, with the tendency so 
strong in us to worship the means and to for- 
get the ends of life. 

Everywhere, as he looks around him, Mr. 
Arnold sees this great British people chasing 
the means of living with unparalleled energy, 
and forgetting the inward things of our be- 
ing, which alone give these means their value. 
We are, in fact, idol-worshippers without 



OF CULTURE. 81 

knowing it. We worsliip freedom, the right 
to do every man as he chooses, careless 
whether the thing we choose to do be good 
or not. We worship raih^oads, steam, coal, 
as if these made a nation's greatness, forget- 
ting that — 

" by the soul 
Only the nations shall be great and free." 

We worship wealth, as men have done in all 
ages, in spite of the voices of all the w^ise, 
only perhaps never before in the world's 
history with such unanimity, such strength 
and consistency of devotion, as at this hour, 
in this land. I must quote the words in 
which he makes Culture address the mam- 
mon-worshippers, those who have either got- 
ten w^ealth, or, being hot in the pursuit of 
it, regard wealth and welfare as synony- 
mous : — 

" Consider," he makes Culture say, " these 
people, their way of life, their habits, their 
manners, the very tones of their voice ; look 
at them attentively, observe the literature 
they read (if they read any), the things that 
give them pleasure, the words which come 
forth from their mouths, the thoughts which 
make the furniture of their minds ; would 
any amount of wealth be worth having with 



82 THE LITERARY THEORY 

the condition that one was to become like 
these people by having it? Thus," he says, 
" culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of 
the highest possible value in stemming the 
common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy 
and industrious community, and which saves 
the future, as one may hope, from being 
wholly materiahzed and vulgarized, if it can- 
not save the present." Against all this ab- 
sorbing faith in machinery, whatever form it 
takes, whether faith in wealth or in liberty, 
used or abused, or in coals and railroads, or 
in bodily health and vigor, or in population, 
Mr. Arnold lifts up an earnest protest. 

It is an old lesson, but one which each age 
forgets and needs to be taught anew: men 
forgetting the inward and spiritual goods, 
and setting their hope on the outward and 
material ones. Against this all the wise of 
the earth have, each one in his day, cried 
aloud, — the philosophers, moralists, and sat- 
irists of Greece and Rome, Plato, Epictetus, 
Seneca, and Juvenal, not less than Hebrew 
prophets and Christian apostles, up to that 
Divine voice which said, " What shall it 
profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and 
lose his own soul ? " 

This same old lesson Mr. Arnold repeats, 



OF CULTURE, 83 

but in modern language, and turns against 
the shapes of idol-Avorship, which he sees 
everywhere around him. 

In contrast, then, to all the grosser inter- 
ests that absorb us, he pleads for a mental 
and spiritual perfection, which has two sides, 
or prominent notes, beauty and intelligence, 
or, borrowing words which Swift first used, 
and which, since Mr. Arnold reproduced 
them, have become proverbial, " Sweetness 
and Light," — " An inward and spiritual ac- 
tivity having for its characters increased 
sweetness, increased light, increased life, in- 
creased sympathy." 

The ao:e of the world in which these two, 
" sweetness and light," were preeminently 
combined was, Mr. Arnold thinks, the best 
age of Athens — that which is Represented 
in the poetry of Sophocles, in wliom " the 
idea of beauty and a full- developed human- 
ity " took to itself a religious and devout 
energy, in the strength of which it worked. 
But this was but for a moment of time, when 
the Athenian mind touched its acme. It 
was a hint of what might be when the world 
was ripe for it, rather than a condition which 
could then continue. In our own countrymen, 



84 THE LITERARY THEORY 

Mr. Arnold believes, partly from the tough- 
ness and earnestness of the Saxon nature, 
partly from the predominance in our edu- 
cation of the Hebrew teaching, the moral 
and religious element has been drawn out 
too exclusively. There is among us an en- 
tire want of the idea of beauty, harmony, 
and completely rounded human excellence. 
These ideas are either unknown to us, or 
entirely misapprehended. 

Mr. Arnold then goes on to contrast his 
idea of a perfectly and harmoniously devel- 
oped human nature with the idea set up by 
Puritanism, and prevalent amid our modern 
multifarious churches. He grants that the 
church organizations have done much. 
They have greatly helped to subdue the 
grosser animalities, — they have made life 
orderly, moral, serious. But when we go 
beyond this, and look at the standards of per- 
fection which these religious organizations 
have held up, he finds them poor and miser- 
able, starving more than a half, and that the 
finest part of human nature. He turns to 
modern religious life, as imaged in the NoU" 
conformist or some other religious newspaper 
of the hour, and asks. What do we find there ? 
" A life of jealousy of other churches, dis- 



OF CULTURE, 85 

putes, tea meetings, openings of chapels, ser- 
mons." And then he exclaims, " Think of 
this as an ideal of human life, completing 
itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its or- 
gans after sweetness, light, and perfection ! " 
'' How," he asks, " is the ideal of a life so 
unlovely, so unattractive, so narrow, so far 
removed from a true and satisfying ideal of 
human perfection, .... to conquer 
and transform all the vice and hideousness " 
that we see around us ? " Indeed, the strong- 
est plea for the study of perfection as pur- 
sued by culture, the clearest proof of the act- 
ual inadequacy of the idea of perfection held 
by the religious organizations, — expressing, 
as I have said, the most wide-spread effort 
which the human race has yet made after 
perfection, ■ — is to be found in the state of our 
life and society with these in possession of it, 
and having been in possession of it I know 
not how many years. We are all of us in- 
cluded in some religious organization or other ; 
we all call ourselves, in the sublime and as- 
piring language of religion, children of God. 
Children of God, — it is an immense preten- 
sion ! — and how are we to justify it ? By 
the works which we do, and the words which 
we speak. And the work which we collect- 



86 THE LITERARY THEORY 

ive children of God do, our grand centre of 
life, our city, is London ! London, with its 
unutterable external hideousness, and with 
its internal canker, pub/ice egestas^ privatim 
opulentia^ unequaled in the world ! " 

These are severe words, yet they have a 
side of truth in them. They portray our act- 
ual state so truly, that, though they may not 
be the whole truth, it is well we should re- 
member them, for they cannot be altogether 
gainsaid. 

I have now done with the exposition of 
Mr. Arnold's theory. Before going on to 
note what seems to me to be its radical de- 
fect, let me first draw attention to two of its 
most prominent merits. 

His pleading for a perfection which con- 
sists in a condition of soul, evenly and har- 
moniously developed, is but a new form of 
saying, '' A man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things wliich he possesseth." 
You wdll say, perhaps. Is not this a very old 
truth ? Why make such ado about it, as 
though it were a new^ discovery ? Has it not 
been expressed far more strongly in the Bible 
than by Mr. Arnold ? True, it is an old 
truth, and we all know it is in the Bible. 



OF CULTURE. 87 

But it is just these old truths which we know 
so well by the ear, but so little with the heart, 
that need to be reiterated to each age in the 
new language which it speaks. The deepest 
truths are always becoming commonplaces, 
till they are revivified by thought. And 
they are true thinkers and benefactors of 
their kind who, having thought them over 
once more, and passed them through the 
alembic of their own hearts, bring them forth 
fresh-minded, and make them tell anew on 
their generation. And of all the old prov- 
erbs that this age needs applied to it, none is 
more needed than that which Mr. Arnold 
has proclaimed so forcibly. 

i^gain, as to the defects which Mr. Ar- 
nold charges against our many and divided 
religious organizations, it cannot be denied 
that the moral and social results we see 
around us are far from satisfactory. In this 
state of thino-s we cannot aiford to neolect 
whatever aid that culture or any other power 
offers, — to ignore those sides and forces of 
human nature w^hich, if called into play, 
might render our ideal at once more com- 
plete and more efficient. There is much to 
excuse the complaints which highly educated 
men are apt to make, that religious minds 



88 THE LITERARY. THEORY 

have often been satisfied witli a very partial 
and narrow development of humanity, such 
as does not satisf}', and ought not to satisfy, 
thouo-htful and cuhivated men. The wise 
and truly religious thing to do is not to get 
angry at such criticisms, and give them bad 
names, but to be candid, and listen to those 
who tell us of our shortcomings, — try to see 
what justice there may be in them, and to 
turn whatever truth they may contain to 
good account. 

Mr. Arnold sets before us a lofty aim, — 
he has bid us seek our good in something un- 
seen, in a spiritual energy. In doing this he 
has done well. But I must hold that he has 
erred in his estimate of what that spiritual 
energy is, and he has missed, I think, the 
true source from which it is to be mainly de- 
rived. For in his account of it he has placed 
that as primary which is secondary and sub- 
ordinate, and made that secondary which by 
right ought to be supreme. 

You will remember that when describing 
his idea of the perfection to be aimed at, he 
makes religion one factor in it, — an impor- 
tant and powerful factor no doubt, still but 
one element out of several, and that not nee- 



OF CULTURE, 89 

essarily the ruling element, but a means to- 
wards an end, higher, more supreme, more 
all-embracing than itself. The end was a 
many-sided, harmonious development of hu- 
man nature, and to this end religion was only 
an important means. 

In thus assigning to religion a secondary, 
however important, place, this theory, as 1 
conceive, if consistently acted on, would an- 
nihilate religion. There are things which 
are either ends in themselves or they are 
nothing; and such, I conceive, religion is. 
It either is supreme, a good in itself and for 
its own sake, or it is not at all. The first 
and great commandment must either be so 
set before us as to be obeyed, entered into, 
in and for itself, without any ulterior view, 
or it cannot be obeyed at all. It cannot be 
made subservient to any ulterior purpose. 
And herein is instanced '' a remarkable law 
of ethics, which is well known to all who 
have given their minds to the subject." I 
shall give it in the words of one who has ex- 
pressed it so well in his own unequaled lan- 
guage that it has been proposed to name it 
after him, Dr. Newman's law : — '' All vir- 
tue and goodness tend to make men pow- 
erful in this world ; but they who aim at the 



90 THE LITERARY THEORY 

power have not the virtue. Again : Virtue 
is its own reward, and brings with it the 
truest and highest pleasures ; but they who 
cultivate it for the pleasure-sake are selfish, 
not religious, and will never gain the pleas- 
ure, because they never can have the virtue." 
Apply this to the present subject. They 
who seek religion for culture-sake are aes- 
thetic, not reUgious, and will never gain that 
grace which rehgion adds to culture, because 
thev never can have the relimon. To seek 
religion for the personal elevation or even 
for the social improvement it brings, is really 
to fall from faith which rests in God and the 
knowledge of Him as the ultimate good, and 
has no by-ends to serve. And what do we 
see in actual life ? There shall be two men, 
one of whom has started on the road of self- 
improvement from a mainly intellectual in- 
terest, from the love of art, literature, sci- 
ence, or from the delight these give, but has 
not been actuated by a sense of responsibility 
to a Hio;her than himself. The other has be- 
gun with some sense of God, and of his rela- 
tion to Him, and starting from this centre 
has gone on to add to it all the moral and 
mental improvement within his reach, feel- 
ing that, beside the pleasure these things give 



OF CULTURE. 91 

in themselves, he will thus best fulfill the 
purpose of Him who gave them, thus best 
promote the good of his fellow-men, and at- 
tain the end of his own existence. Which 
of these two will be the highest man, in 
which will be gathered up the most excellent' 
graces of character, the truest nobility of 
soul? You cannot doubt it. The sense 
that a man is serving a Higher than himself, 
with a service which will become ever more 
and more perfect freedom, evokes more pro- 
found, more humbling, more exalted emo- 
tions til an anything else in the world can do. 
The spirit of man is an instrument which 
cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, ex- 
cept under the immediate hand of the Divine 
Harmonist. That is, before it can educe the 
highest capacities of which human nature is 
susceptible, culture must cease to be merely 
culture, and pass over into religion. And 
here we see another aspect of that great eth- 
ical law already noticed as compassing all 
human action, whereby " the abandoning of 
some lower object in obedience to a higher 
aim is made the very condition of securing 
the said lower object." According to this law 
it comes that he will approach nearer to per- 
fection, or (since to speak of perfection in such 



92 THE LITERARY THEORY 

as we are sounds like presumption) rather 
let us say, he will reach further, will attain 
to a truer, deeper, more lovely humanity, 
who makes not culture, but oneness with the 
will of God, his ultimate aim. The ends of 
culture, truly conceived, are best attained by 
forgetting culture, and aiming higher. And 
what is this but translating into modern and 
less forcible lano;uao;e the old words, whose 
meaning is often greatly misunderstood, 
" Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all 
other things will be added unto you? " But 
bv seekino; the other thino;s first, as we nat- 
urally do, we miss not only the kingdom of 
God, but those other things also which are 
only truly attained by aiming beyond them. 
Another objection to the theory we have 
been considering remains to be noted. Its 
starting-point is the idea of perfecting self; 
and though, as it gradually evolves, it tries to 
forget self, and to include quite other ele- 
ments, yet it never succeeds in getting clear 
of the b\int of self-reference with which it set 
out. While making this objection, I do not 
forgot that Mr. Arnold, in drawing out his 
view, proposes as the end of culture to make 
reason and the kingdom of God prevail ; that 
he sees clearly, and insists strongly, that an 



OF CULTURE. 93 

• 

isolated self-culture is impossible, that we 
cannot make progress towards perfection 
ourselves, unless we strive earnestly to carry 
our fellow-men along with us. Still may it 
not with justice be said that these unselfish 
elements — the desire for others' good, the 
desire to advance God's kingdom on earth 
— are in this theory awakened, not simply 
for their own sakes, not chiefly because they 
are good in themselves, but because they are 
clearly discerned to be necessary to our self- 
perfection, — elements apart from which this 
cannot exist ? And so it comes that culture, 
though made our end never so earnestly, 
cannot shelter a man from thoughts about 
himself, cannot free him from that which all 
must feel to be fatal to high character, — 
continual self-consciousness. The only 
forces strong enough to do this are great 
truths which carry him out of and beyond 
himself, the things of the spiritual world 
sought, not mainly because of their reflex ac- 
tion on us, but for their own sakes, because 
of their own inherent worthiness. There is 
perhaps no truer sign that a man is really 
advancing than that he is learning to forgot 
himself, that he is losing^ the natural thouo^hts 
about self in the thought of One higher than 



94 THE LITERARY THEORY 

himself, to whose guidance he can commit 
himself and all men. This is no doubt a les- 
son not quickly learnt ; but there is no help 
to learning it in theories of self-culture which 
exalt man's natural self-seeking into a spe- 
cious and refined philosophy of life. 

Again, it would seem that in a world 
made like ours, Culture, as Mr. Arnold con- 
ceives it, instead of becoming an all-embrac- 
ing bond of brotherhood, is likely to be rather 
a principle of exclusion and isolation. Cul- 
ture such as he pictures is at present con- 
fessedly the possession of a very small circle. 
Consider, then, the average powers of 'men, 
the circumstances in which the majority 
must live, the physical wants that must al- 
ways be uppermost in their thoughts, and 
say if we can conceive that, even in the 
most advanced state of education and civili- 
zation possible, high culture can become the 
common portion of the multitude. And 
with the few on a high level of cultivation, 
the many, to take the best, on a much lower, 
what is the natural result ? Fastidious ex- 
clusiveness on the part of the former, which 
is hardly human, certainly not Christian. 
Take any concourse of men, from the House 
of Commons down to the humblest conven- 



OF CULTURE. 95 

tide, how will the majority of them appear 
to eyes refined by elaborate culture, but not 
humanized by any deeper sentiment ? To 
such an onlooker will not the countenances 
of most seem unlovely, their manners repul- 
sive, their modes of thought commonplace, — 
it may be, sordid ? By any such concourse 
the man of mere culture will, I think, feel 
himself repelled, not attracted. So it must 
be, because Culture, being mainly a literary 
and aesthetic product, finds little in the un- 
lettered multitude that is akin to itself. It 
is, after all, a dainty and divisive quality, 
and cannot reach to the depths of humanity. 
To do this takes some deeper, broader, more 
brotherly impulse, one which shall touch the 
universal ground on wliich men are one, not 
that in which they differ, — their common 
nature, common destiny, the needs that poor 
and rich alike share. For this we must look 
elsewhere than to Culture, however enlarged. 
The view I have been enforcing will ap- 
pear more evident if from abstract arguments 
we turn to the actual lives of men. Take 
any of the highest examples of our race, 
those who have made all future generations 
their debtors. Can we imagine any of these 
being content to set before themselves, 



96 THE LITERARY THEORY 

merely as the end of their endeavors, such 
an aim as the harmonious development of 
human nature ? A Goethe perhaps might, 
and if we take him as the highest, we will 
take his theory likewise. Hardly, I think, 
Shakespeare, if we can conceive of him as 
ever having set before liimself consciously 
any formal aim. But could we imagine St. 
Paul doing so, or Augustine, or Luther, or 
such men as Pascal or Archbishop Leighton ? 
Would such a theory truly represent the 
ends they lived for, the powers that actuated 
them, the ideal whence thev drew their 
streno-th ? These men chano;ed the moral 
orbit of the world, but by what lever did 
they change it ? Not by seeking their own 
perfection, nor even by making the progress 
of the race their only aim. They found a 
higher, more permanent world on which to 
plant the lever that was to move this one. 
They sought first the advancement of the 
kingdom of God and truth for its own sake, 
and they knew that this embraced the true 
good of man and every other good thing. 

Indeed, of Culture put in the supreme 
place, it has been well said that it holds 
forth a hope for humanity by enlightening 
self, and not a hope for humanity by dying 



OF CULTURE, 97 

to self. This last is the hope which Chris- 
tianity sets before us. It teaches, what in- 
deed human experience in the long-run 
teaches too, that man's chief good lies in 
ceasing from the Individual Self, that he may 
live in a higher Personality, in whose pur- 
pose all the ends of our true Perscmality are 
secure. The sayings in the Gospels to this 
effect will readily occur to every one. Some 
glimpse of the same truth had visited the 
mind of the speculative Greek poet four 
hundred years before the Christian era, 
when he said : — 

lU otSev et TO ^r^v fiiv eart, Kardaveiv^ 
To KarOavelv 5e ^t^v ; 

" Who knoweth whether life may not be death, 
And death itself be life ? " 

There is but one other thought I would 
submit to you. Those who build their chief 
hope for humanity on Culture rather than on 
Religion would raise men by bringing them 
into contact and sympathy with whatever of 
best and greatest the past has produced. But 
is not a large portion of what is best in the 
literature and the lives of past generations 
based on faith in God, and on the reality of 
commanion with Him as the first and chief 
good ? Would this best any longer live and 



98 THE LITERARY THEORY 

grow in men If you cut them off from direct 
access to its fountain-head, and confined them 
to the results which it has produced in past 
ages, — if, in fact, you made the object of the 
soul's contemplation not God, but past hu- 
manity ? Are we of these latter days to be 
content with the results of the communion 
of others, and not have direct access to it 
ourselves, — to read and admire the high 
thoughts of a Kempis, Pascal, Leighton, and 
such men, and not to go on and drink for 
ourselves from the same living well-heads 
from which they drank ? Not now, any 
more than in past ages, can the most be 
made of human character, even in this life, 
till we ascend above humanity, — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how mean a thing is man ! '* 

I cannot close without expressing a feeling 
which I dare say has been present to the 
minds of many here, as throughout this lec- 
ture they listened to the oft-repeated word 
perfection. Perfection ! the very word 
seems like mockery when applied to such as 
we. For how poor a thing must any per- 
fection be that is reached this side the grave ! 
Far truer is that word of St. Augustine, — 
" That is the true perfection of a man, to 



OF CULTURE. 99 

find out his own imperfection." Yes, the 
highest perfection any one will attain in this 
life is to be ever increasingly sensible how 
imperfect he is. As perfection is put for- 
ward in the theory I have been examining, 
one cannot but feel that there is a A^ery in- 
adequate notion of the evil in the human 
heart that is to be cured, and of the nature 
of the powers that are needed to cope with 
it. And in this respect we cannot but be 
struck with how greatly Christianity differs 
from Culture, and differs only to surpass it : 
its estimate of the disease is so much deeper, 
and the remedy to which it turns so far 
transcends all human nostrums. Christianity, 
too, holds out perfection as the goal. But in 
doing so its view is not confined to time, but 
contemplates an endless progression in far-on 
ages. The perfection the Culturists speak 
of, if it does not wholly exclude the other 
life, seems to fix the eye mainly on what can 
be done here, and not to take much account 
of what is beyond. That was a higher and 
truer idea of perfection which Leighton had : 
" It is an union with a Higher Good by love, 
that alone is endless perfection. The only 
sufficient object for man must be something 
that adds to and perfects his nature, to which 



100 THE LITERARY THEORY 

he must be united in love ; somewhat higher 
than himself, yea, the highest of all, the 
Father of spirits. That alone completes a 
spirit and blesses it, — to love Him, the 
spring of spirits." 

To sum up all that has been said, the de- 
fect in Mr. Arnold's theory is this : It places 
in the second and subordinate place that 
which should be supreme, and elevates to the 
position of command a power which, rightly 
understood, should be subordinate and ininis- 
trant to a higher than itself. The relation to 
God is first, this relation is last, and Culture 
should fill up the interspace, — Culture, that 
is, the endeavor to know and use aright the 
nature which He has given us, and the world 
in which He has placed us. Used in such a 
way. Culture is transmuted into something 
far higher, more beneficent, than it ever 
could become if it set up for itself and claimed 
the chief place. 

I might now conclude, but there is a poem 
of Archbishop Trench's, one of his earliest, 
and most interesting, which so well embodies 
much that I have said, that I hope you will 
bear with me while I read a somewhat 
lengthy passage from it. The lines are 



OF CULTURE, 101 

Simple, not greatly elaborated, but they are 
true, and tliey may perhaps fix the attention 
of some who by this time have grown weary 
of abstract and prosaic argument, — accord- 
ing to that saying, — 

** A verse may find him who a sermon flies." 

A youth, a favored child of Culture, when 
he has long sought and not found what he 
expected to find in Culture, wanders forth 
desolate and desponding into the eastern des- 
ert. The irrevocable past lies heavy on him, 
— his baffled purpose, his wasted years, his 
utter misery. So heart-forlorn is he that 
he is on the verge of self-destruction. At 
leno-th, as he sits inconsolable beside a ruined 
temple in the desert, an old man stands by 
his side, and asks, " What is your sorrow ? " 
The youth, lured by some strange sympathy 
in the old man's mien and voice, unburdens 
to him his grief, tells how he has tried to 
make and keep himself wise and pure and 
elevated above the common crowd, that in 
his soul's mirror he might find 

*'A reflex of the eternal mind, 
A glass to give him back the truth," 

how he has followed after ideal beauty, to 
live in its light, dwell beneath its shadow, 
but at length has found that this too is 
vanity and emptiness. 



102 THE LITERARY THEORY 

" Till now, my j^outh yet scarcely done, 
The heart which I had thought to steep 
In hues of beauty, and to keep 
Its consecrated home and fane, 
That heart is soiled with many a stain, 
Which from without or from within 
Has gathered there till all is sin, ^ 

Till now I only draw my breath, 
I live but in the hope of death." 

After an interval the old man replies, 

" Ah me, my son, 
A weary course your life has run; 
And 5^et it need not be in vain 
That you have suffered all this pain; . . 
Nay, deem not of us at as strife. 
Because you set before youV life 
A purpose, and a loftier aim 
Than the blind lives of men may claim 
For the mo-^t part; or that you sought, 
By fixed resolve and solemn thought, 
To lift your being's calm estate 
Out of the range of time and fate. 
Glad am I that a thing unseen, 
A spiritual Presence, this has been 
Your worship, this your young heart stirred. 
But yet herein you proudly erred. 
Here may the source of woe be found,. 
You thought to fling yourself around 
The atmosphere of light and love 
In which it was your joy to move; 
You thought by efforts of your own 
To take at last each jarring tone 
Out of your life, till all should meet 
In one majestic music sweet; 
And deemed that in your own heart's ground 
The root of good was to be found, 
And that by careful watering 
And earnest tendance we might bring 



OF CULTURE, 103 

The bud, the blossom, and the fruit, 
To grow and flourish from that root. 
You deemed you needed nothing more 
Than skill and courage to explore 
Deep down enough in your own heart, 
To where the well-head lay apart, 
AVhich must the springs of being feed, 
And that these fountains did but need 
The soil that choked them moved away, 
To bubble in the open day. 
But thanks to Heaven it is not so: 
That root a richer soil doth know 
Than our poor hearts could e'er supply; — 
That stream is from a source more high; 
From God it came, to God returns, 
Not nourished from our scanty urns, 
But fed from His unfailing river. 
Which runs and will run on forever.** 



LECTURE IV. 

HINDRANCES TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 

It has often happened that when the sons 
of a familv, after havino; been for some ses 
sions at College, have returned to their own 
homes, bursars, or scholars, or M. A.'s with 
honors, the family have felt that somehow 
they were changed, had lost their old simple 
natures, and for this loss college learning and 
distinctions seemed but a poor substitute. 
This, however, may be only a temporary re- 
sult of severe mental tension and seclusion. 
When the bow has been for a time unstrung, 
the unnaturalness passes, and the native, 
simple self reappears. 

But I have known other stories than these. 
I have heard of devout and self-denying par- 
ents, working late and early, and stinting 
themselves to send their sons to College, and 
in sending them their fond hope was that 
these young men would return stored witb 
knowledge and wisdom, and be able to help 



HINDRANCES TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 105 

their parents in those religious subjects on 
which their hearts were most set. Such 
hopes, we may trust, have many times been 
realized. But one has heard of cases which 
had another issue. A young man has come 
home, after a college course, acute, logical, 
speculative, full of the newest views, prating 
of high matters, scientific and philosophical, 
a very prodigy of enlightenment. But that 
on which early piety had fed was forsaken, 
the old reverence was gone, and the parents 
saw, with helpless sorrow, that their son had 
chosen for himself a far other road than that 
on which they were travelling, and in which 
they had hoped he would travel with them. 

It is a common tale, one which has often 
been repeated, but none the less pathetic for 
that. It brino;s before us the collision that 
often occurs when newly awakened intellect 
first meets with early faith. No one who 
has observed men ever so little but must 
know something, either through his own ex- 
perience or from watching others, of these 
travail-pangs that often accompany the birth 
of thought. 

The special trial of each spirit lies in that 
very field in which his strength and activity 
are put forth. The temptation of the busy 



106 HINDRANCES TO 

trader does not consist in mental question- 
ings, but in the tendency to inordinate love 
of gain. The aesthetic spirit finds its trial, 
not in coarse pleasures, but in the temptation 
to follow beauty exclusively, and to turn 
effeminately from duty and self-denial. And 
in like manner the student or man of letters 
will most likely find his trial in dealing 
rightly with the intellectual side of things, 
giving to it its due place, and not more. 
What are some of the difficulties and temp- 
tations which the student is apt to meet with, 
and which may be the best way to deal with 
them, — this is the subject which will engage 
us to-day. Before entering on it, however, 
let me say distinctly that I do not believe 
that painful questionings and violent mental 
convulsions are an ordeal whicfi all thought- 
ful persons must needs pass through. So far 
from this, some of the finest spirits, those 
whose vision is most intuitive and penetrat- 
ing, are the most exempt from such anxious 
soul-travail. Indeed, I believe that there is 
no such safeguard against the worst conse- 
quences of such perplexities as a heart that is 
pure, humble, and ^' at leisure from itself." 
In the words of a modern divine, one well 
known at the present time, both as an up- 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 107 

holder of freedom of inquiry, and also as a 
religious and devoted man, — 

*' There are some who are never troubled 
with doubts at all. They live so heavenly a 
life that doubts and perplexities fall off their 
minds without fastening. They find enough 
in their faith to feed their spiritual life. They 
do not need to inquire into the foundations 
of their belief, they are inspired by a power 
within their hearts. The heavenly side of 
all truths is so clear to them that any doubts 
about the human form of it are either unin- 
telligible or else at once rejected. They 
grow in knowledge by quiet, steady increase 
of light, without any intervals of darkness 
and difficulty. This is the most blessed state, 
— that of those who can believe without the 
evidence either of sense or of labored argu- 
ment. There are such minds. There are 
those to whom the inward proof is every- 
thing. They believe not on the evidence of 
their senses, or of their mere reason, but on 
that of their consciences and hearts. Their 
spirits within them are so attuned to the 
truth that the moment it is presented to them 
they accept it at once. And this is certainly 
the higher state, the more Iblessed, the more 
heavenly." 



108 HINDRANCES TO 

These are they who have always rejoiced 
in a serene, unclouded vision till they are 
taken home. And we have known such. 

Let none, therefore, pique themselves on 
having doubts and questionings on religious 
subjects, as if it were a fine thing to have 
them, proving them to be intellectual ath- 
letes, and entitling them to look down on 
those who are free from them as inferior per- 
sons, less mentally gifted. For there is a 
higher state than their own — there is a purer 
atmosphere, which has been breathed by per- 
sons of as strono; intellect as themselves, but 
of a finer spirit. But such is not the state 
of all thoughtful men. There are many who 
when they reach the reasoning age find 
themselves in the midst of many difficulties, 
hedged in with '' perplexities which they can- 
not explain to themselves, much less to oth- 
ers, and no one to help them." They are " 
afraid to tell their sad heart-secrets to others, 
and especially to their elders, lest they find 
no sympathy. And so they are tempted to 
shut them up within their own breasts, and 
brood over them till they get morbid and 
magnify their difficulties out of all proportion 
to their reality. In the case of such persons 
it becomes a serious question how they 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 109 

should be advised to treat the difficulties that 
occur to them. On the one hand, while 
they are not to make little questions of great 
consequence, neither must they make grave 
questions and perplexities of little conse- 
quence. They are to be told that while all 
doubts are painful, all are not necessarily 
wrong. For some are natural, born of hon- 
esty, and, when rightly dealt with, have often 
ere now become the birth-pangs of larger 
knowledo;e, — the straits throuo;h which men 
passed to clearer light. There are, on the 
other hand, doubts which are sinful, born of 
levity, irreverence, and self-conceit, or of a 
hard and perverted conscience. To deter- 
mine to which class any particular mental 
perplexities belong is not easy for a man even 
in his own case ; much more is it difficult, nay 
impossible, for us to read the mental state of 
another, and pronounce judgment on it. The 
fact that some doubts are not sinless, that they 
may arise out of the state of a man's spirit, 
suggests to every one cautiousness and self- 
scrutiny. This is a work which no man can 
do for his brother. Each man must take his 
own difficulties into the light of conscience 
and of God, and there deal with them hon- 
estly yet humbly, seeking to be guided aright. 



110 HINDRANCES TO 

For the spirit of a man is a very delicate in- 
strument, which, if it be distorted out of its 
natural course, this way or that, by prejudice 
or interest or double-dealing on the one hand, 
or fool-hardiness and self-confidence on the 
other, may never perhaps in this life recover 
its equilibrium. 

I should be loath to seem to trespass 
either on the speculative field of the theolog- 
ical professor, or on the practical one of the 
Christian minister. But, without doing 
either, there is room enough for offering 
such suggestions as have been gathered from 
a number of years not unobservant,! of what 
has been going on in that border land where 
faith and knowledge meet. To young and 
ardent spirits the wrestling with hard ques- 
tions on the very verge of human knowledge 
has a wonderful fascination. They throw 
themselves fearlessly into the abyss, and 
think that they shall be able to dive down to 
depths hitherto unsounded. Problems that 
have bafiled the world's best thinkers will, 
they fancy, yield up to them their secret. 
Yet these things " do take a sober coloring " 
from eyes w^hich have seen too many young 
men, some of them the finest spirits of our 
time, setting forth in over-confidence in their 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. HI 

own powers, imagining that they were suf- 
ficient to meet all difficulties, and comincr 
before long to mournful shipwreck. When 
experience has impressed us with the fall im- 
portance of the mental tendencies for good 
and for evil which often begin at College, 
who would not be earnestly disposed to turn 
his experience, if he might, to the help of 
those younger than himself, at that interest- 
ing time of life when they most need help, 
and often least find it ? But then there 
comes upon the mind the conviction that this 
is an issue wherein, in the last resort, no one 
can bear his brother's burden. All that we 
can do is to suo-o-est certain dano;ers to which 
the student is from the nature of his occupa- 
tions peculiarly exposed, and to leave it to 
each for himself to apply what is said consci- 
entiously, according as he feels that it bears 
on his need. 

I. The first hindrance I will notice is one 
which arises out of the very nature of men- 
tal cultivation. If there is one thing which 
more than another distinguishes a well -trained 
mind, it is the power of thinking clearly, of 
dividing with a sharp line between its knowl- 
edge and its ignorance. One of the best re- 



112 HINDRANCES TO 

suits of a lo2:Ical and also of a scientific disci- 
pline is that it leads us to form definite, 
clearly cut conceptions of things. Indeed, 
this power of limiting, defining, making a 
o/)os or bound round each object you think of, 
and thus making them thinkable, is of the 
very essence of thought. For what is all 
thought but a rescuing, a cutting off by the 
mind's inherent power of bounding, objects 
from out the vaojiue and undefined? But 
this quality of all thought, which in trained 
thought is raised to a higher power, while it 
constitutes mental strength, contains also its 
own weakness, or rather limitation. Clearly 
defined knowledge is mainly of things we see. 
All find it much easier to form definite con- 
ceptions of objects of the outer sense than of 
objects of the inner sense, — to conceive 
clearly things we see, hear, and touch, than 
those thoughts which have not any outward 
object corresponding to them. If thoughts 
are difficult adequately to grasp, much more 
are emotions, — with their infinite complexity, 
their evanescent shades. But each man 
gains a power of realizing and firmly conceiv- 
ing those things he habitually deals with, and 
not other things. The man whose training 
has lain exclusively in physics, accurately con- 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 113 

ceives physical forces, however subtle, and 
can lay down their relations to each other ; 
but then he will probably be comparatiyely 
weak in apprehending subtleties of thought and 
mental relations. Again, the mere logician, 
while strong to grasp logical distinctions, will 
generally be found comparatlyely at sea when 
he has to catch the imaginative aspects of 
things, and fix evanescent hues of feeling. 
This takes something of the poetic faculty. 
Each man is strong in that he is trained in, 
weak in other regions, — so much so that 
often the objects there seem ta him non- 
existent. 

Now the scientific mind and the logical 
mind, when turned towards the supersensi- 
ble world, are apt to find the same difficulty, 
only in a much greater degree, as they find 
in dealing with objects of imagination, or 
with pure emotions. Whoever has tried to 
think steadily at all on religious subjects 
must be aware of this difficulty. When we 
look upward, and try to think of God and of 
the soul's relation to Him, we are apt to feel 
as if we had stepped out into a world in w^hich 
the understanding finds little or no firm foot- 
ing. We cannot present to ourselves these 
truths adequately, and as they really are. 



114 HINDRANCES TO 

Therefore we are under the necessity of 
" substituting anthropomorphic conceptions, 
determined by accidents of place and time, 
— to speak of God as dwelKng above, to at- 
tribute a before and an after to the Divine 
thought." With these feeble adumbrations, 
which are the nearest approaches to the re- 
ality we can make, the devout mind is con- 
tent, feeling them to be full of meaning. But 
the scientific and the logical mind often feels 
great difficulty in being content with these. 
It craves more exactness of outline, and is 
tempted to reject as non-existent things which 
it cannot subject to the laws of thought to 
which it is accustomed, — in fact, to limit 
the orb of belief to the orb of exact knowl- 
edge. Mere adumbrations of spiritual reali- 
ties are an offense to the mind that will ac- 
cept only scientific exactness. The falsity of 
this way of reasoning has been well exposed 
by Coleridge, where he protests against 
"the application of deductive and conclusive 
logic to subjects concerning which the prem- 
ises are expressed in not merely inadequate 
but accommodated terms. But to conclude 
terms proper and adequate from quasific and 
mendicant premises is illogical logic with a 
vengeance. Water cannot rise higher than 
its source, neither can human reasoning." 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 115 

The fact is, those root-truths, on which 
the foundations of our being rest, are appre- 
hended not logically at all, but mystically. 
This faculty of spiritual apprehension, which 
is a very different one from those which are 
trained in schools and colleges, must be edu- 
cated and fed, not less but more carefully 
than our lower faculties, else it will be 
starved and die, however learned or able in 
other respects we may become. And the 
means whicli train it are reverent thousrht, 
meditation, prayer, and all those other means 
by which the divine life is fed. 

But because the primary truths of religion 
refuse to be caught in the grip of the logical 
vice, — because they are, as I said, transcend- 
ent, and only mystically apprehended, — are 
thinking men therefore either to give up 
these objects as impossible to think about, or 
to content themselves with a vague religi- 
ositv, an unreal sentimentalism ? Not so. 
There are certain veritable facts of conscious- 
ness to which religion makes its appeal. 
These the thinking man must endeavor to 
apprehend with as much definiteness as their 
nature admits of, — must verify them by his 
own inward experience, and by the recorded 
experience of the most religious men. And 



116 HINDRANCES TO 

there are other facts outside of our conscious- 
ness and above it, which are revealed that 
they may fit into and be taken up bj those 
needs of which we are conscious. Rightly 
to apprehend them, so that we shall make 
them our own inwardly, so that they shall 
supplement, deepen, and expand our moral 
perceptions, not contradict and traverse 
them, this is no easy work. It is the work 
of the reflective side of the religious life. 
But when all is done, it will still remain, 
that in the whole process intellect or the 
mere understanding is but a subordinate 
agent, and must be kept so. The primary 
agent, on our side, is that power of spiritual 
apprehension which we know under many 
names, nono perhaps better than those old 
ones, " the hearing ear, the understanding 
heart." The main condition is that the 
spiritual ear should be open to overhear and 
patiently take in, and the will ready to obey, 
that testimony which, I believe, God bears 
in every human heart, however dull, to those 
great truths which the Bible reveals. This, 
and not logic, is the way to grow in religious 
knowledge, to know that the truths of re- 
ligion are not shadows, but deep realities. 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 117 

II. Akin to the desire for exact concep- 
tions is the desire for system. The longing 
to systematize, to form a completely rounded 
theory of the universe, which shall embrace 
all known facts, and assign to each its proper 
place, this craving lies deep in the intellec- 
tual man. It is at the root of science and of 
philosophy in its widest sense : out of it has 
arisen the whole fabric of exact and scientific 
knowledge. But this, like other good ten- 
dencies, may be overdone, and become rash 
and one-sided. From this impulse, too has- 
tily carried out, arise such theories of life as 
that of Professor Huxley, which was discussed 
in a former lecture. It is this that gives to 
Positivism the charm it has for many ener- 
getic minds. It seems such gain to reach a 
comprehensive, all-embracing point of view, 
from which all knowledge shall be seen 
mapped out, every object and science falling 
into its proper place, and all uncertainty, all 
cloudy horizons, rigorously shut out. To 
many minds, nothing seems too great a price 
to pay for this. And to secure it, they have 
to pay a great price. They have to cut off 
unspairingly all the ragged rims of knowl- 
edo;e, to exclude from view the whole border 
land between the definitely conceived and 



118 HINDRANCES TO 

the dimly apprehended, — the very region 
in which the main difficulties of thought pe- 
culiarly lie. They have to shut their eyes 
to all those phenomena, often the most in- 
teresting, which they cannot locate. But 
though such systematizers exclude them 
from their system, they cannot exclude them 
from reality. There they remain rooted all 
the same, whether we recognize them or not. 
Shut them out as you may, they will, in 
spite of all theories, reappear, cropping out in 
human history and in human consciousness. 
Now it so happens that of these facts which 
refuse to be systematized, a large part, but 
by no means all, arise out of man's religious 
nature. The existence of evil, manifesting 
itself in man's consciousness as the sense of 
sin, or estrangement from God, recovery 
from this, not by any power evolved from 
man's own resources, but by a power which 
descended from above, when " heaven 
opened itself anew to man's long-alienated 
race," — these, and all the facts they imply, 
are, and always have been, a stumbling- 
block to those who are bent on a rounded 
system. Hence every age, and this age pre- 
eminently, has seen attempts to resolve 
Christianity into a natural product. Because 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 119 

it enters into all things human, and moulds 
them to itself, the attempt is made to account 
for it by the joint action of those spiritual 
elements which preexisted in human nature. 
Such attempts Christianity has for eigliteen 
centuries withstood, and will withstand till 
the end. The idea of a power coming down 
from a higher sphere to work in and renew 
the natural forces of humanity, must always 
be repugnant to any mode of thought which 
makes a complete system the first necessity. 
No doubt the craving for a system is a deep 
instinct of the purely intellectual man, but it 
is a verydifferent thing from the craving for 
Tightness with God, which is the prime in- 
stinct of the spiritual man. When once 
awakened, the spiritual faculty far outgoes 
all systems, scientific, philosophic, or theo- 
logical, and apprehends and lives by truths 
which these cannot reduce to system. 

III. Again, there is another way in which 
thouo-ht seems often to 2et cauo-ht in its own 
meshes, and so fall short of the highest truth. 
There is a tendency, not 'peculiar to the 
present day, though very prevalent now, to 
rest in Law, whether in the natural or moral 
world, and to shrink from going beyond it 



120 HINDRANCES TO 

up to God. There are those who think that 
when science has ascended to the most 2:en- 
eral uniformities of sequence and coexistence, 
then knowledge has reached its limit, and all 
beyond is mere conjecture. To this I will 
not reply, in the old phrase, about a law and 
a law-giver, for this to some seems a play on 
words. But one thing, often said before, 
must be rejjeated. This supposed necessity 
to rest in the perception of ordered phenom- 
ena, is no necessity at all, but an artificial 
and arbitrarily imposed limitation, against 
which thought left to its natural action rebels. 
It is impossible for any reflective mind, not 
dominated by a system, to regard the ordered 
array of physical forces, and to rest satisfied 
with this order, without croino; on to ask 
whence it came, what placed it there. 
Thought cannot be kept back, when it sees 
arrano;ement, from askino; what is the arrano;- 
ing power ; when it sees existence, from in- 
quiry how it came to exist. And the ques- 
tion is a natural and legitimate one, in spite 
of all that phenomenalism may say against it, 
and it will not cease to be asked while there 
are reasoning men to ask it. 

The same habit of mind is fain, in moral 
subjects, to rest in moral law. But, if we 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 121 

look closely at reality, what are moral law, 
moral order, but abstractions generalized 
from facts felt and observed by all men? 
They are not self-subsisting entities, such as 
our own personality is. And a living will 
would be justified in refusing allegiance to a 
mere abstraction, however high or seemingly 
imperative, if there was nothing behind it. 
It is because moral law is but a condensed 
expression for the energy of, shall I say, a 
Higher Personality, or something greater, 
more living, more all-encompassing, than 
personality, that it comes home to us with 
the power it does. 

These are but a few of the more obvious 
ways in which our intellectual habits may, 
and often do, become a hindrance instead of 
a help towards spiritual progress. There 
are many other ways, more subtle and hard 
to deal with, some of which I had intended 
to notice. But for to-day you have probably 
had enough of abstractions. And what re- 
mains of our time must be given to more 
practical considerations. 

Religious men are always trying to set 
forth in defense of their faith demonstrations 
which shall be irrefragable. This is natural, 
nor do I say that it is altogether unwise. 



122 HINDRANCES TO 

For as facts and doctrines form the intellec- 
tual outworks of faith, historical criticism 
must make good the one, sound philosophy 
must so far warrant the other. But when 
all that argument can do has been done, it 
still remains true that the best and most con- 
vincing grounds of faith will still remain 
behind unshaped into argument. There is a 
great reserve fund of conviction arising from 
the increased experience which Christian 
men have of the truth of what they believe. 
And this cannot be beat out into syllogisms. 
It is something too inward, too personal, too 
mystical, to be set forth so.^ It is not on 
that account the less real and powerful. In- 
deed, it may be said that once felt it is the 
most self-evidencing of all proofs. This is 
what Coleridge said, " If you wish to be as- 
sured of the truth of Christianity, try it." 
'' Believe, and if thy belief be right, that 
insight which gradually transmutes faith into 
knowledge will be the reward of thy belief." 
To be vitally convinced of the truth of '' the 
process of renewal described by Scripture, a 
man must put himself within that process." 
His own experience of its truth, and the con- 
fident assurances of others, whom, if candid, 

1 Note VI. 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 123 

he will feel to be better than himself, will be 
the most sufficing evidence. But this is an 
evidence w^iich, while it satisfies a man's 
self, cannot be brought to bear on those who 
stand without tlie pale, and deny those things 
of which they have not themselves experi- 
ence. 

Many are apt to imagine that a hard head 
and a blameless deportment make a man 
free of the inner shrine of Christian truth. 
When a scholar goes forth from college well 
equipped with the newest methods, he some- 
times fancies that he holds the key to which 
all the secrets of faith must open. And if 
they do not at once yield to his mental efforts, 
he is tempted to regard them as untrue. 
But clear and trained intellect is one thing, 
spiritual discernment quite another. The 
former does not exclude, but neither does it 
necessarily include the latter. They are en- 
ergies of two different sides of our being. 
Unless the spiritual nature in a man is alive 
and active, it is in vain that he works at relig- 
ious truth merely from the intellectual side. 
If he is not awake in a deeper region than 
his intellectual, though he may be an able 
critic or dialectician, a vital theologian or a 
religious man he cannot be. Not long ago I 



124 HINDRANCES TO 

read this remark of the German theologian 
Rothe, — ''It is only the pious subject that 
can speculate theologically. And why? 
Because it is he alone who has -the orio-inal 
datum, in virtue of communion with God on 
which the dialectic lays hold. So soon as 
the original datum is there, everything else 
becomes simply a matter of logic." Or as a 
thoughtful English scholar and divine lately 
expressed it: — "Of all qualities which a 
theologian must possess, a devotional spirit is 
the chief. For the soul is laro:er than the 
mind, and the religious emotions lay hold on 
the truths to which they are related on many 
sides at once. A powerful understanding, 
on the other hand, seizes on single points, 
and however enlarged in its own sphere, is 
of itself never safe from narrowness of view. 
For its very ofSce is to analyze, which im- 
plies that thought is fixed down to particular 
relations of the subject. No mental concep- 
tion, still more no expression in words, can 
give the full significance of any fact, least of 
all of a divine fact. Hence it is that mere 
reasoning is found such an ineffectual measure 
against simple piety, and devotion is such a 
safeo;uard ao;ainst intellectual errors." Yes, 
" the original datum," that is the main thing. 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 125 

And what is this but that which our old Pu- 
ritan 'forefathers meant when they spoke of a 
man '' havino; the root of the matter hi him ? " 
Tlie devout spirit is not fed by purely intel- 
lectual processes, — sometimes it is even frus- 
trated by them. The hard brain-work and 
the seclusion of the student tend, if uncoun- 
teracted, to dry up the springs alike of the 
human sympathies and of the heavenward 
emotions. It w^as a savino; of Dr. Arnold, 
certainly no disparager of intellect, that no 
student could continue long in a healthy relig- 
ious state unless his. heart was kept tender by 
minghng with children, or by frequent inter- 
course with the poor and the suffering. 

And this suggests a subject which might 
occupy a whole lecture or course of lectures, 
to which, however, now only a few words can 
be given. It is one main object of all our 
education here to train the critical faculty. 
This faculty, educated by scholarship, has an 
important function to fill in matters bearing 
on religion. With regard to these it has a 
work to do w^hich ouo;ht not to be disre swarded, 
and that w^ork it is at present doing actively 
enouo;h. To weio-h evidence, and form a sound 
judgment whether alleged facts are really 
true, whether documents really belong to the 



126 HINDRANCES TO 

age and the authors they profess to be of, — 
by trained historical imagination to enter into 
the whole circumstances and meaning of any 
past age, — to examine the meaning of the Sa- 
cred Scriptures, and see '' how far its modes 
and figures of representation are merely vehi- 
cles of inner truth, or are of the essence of 
the truth itself, — to understand the human 
conditions of the writers, and appreciate how 
far these may have influenced their state- 
ments, — to give to past theological language 
its proper weight, and not more than its 
proper weight, — to trace the history of its 
terms so as not to confound human thought 
with divine faith," — all these processes are 
essential to the theologian, — some measure 
of them is required in every educated man 
who will think rightly on such subjects. I 
would not underrate the value of this kind of 
work. It is necessary in the educated, if 
well-grounded religion is to live among the 
people, a-nd faith is not to be wholly dis- 
severed from intellectual truth. At the same 
time it is carried on in the outworks rather 
than in the citadel, it deals with the shells 
rather than with the kernel of divine things. 
This vocation of the critic, however useful 
for others, has dangers for himself. There 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH, 12T 

is a risk that criticism shall absorb his whole 
being. This is no imaginary danger. We 
are not called on to believe this or that doc- 
trine which may be proposed to us till we can 
do so from honest conviction. But we are 
called on to trust, — to trust ourselves to 
God, being sure that He will lead us right, — 
to keep close to Him, — and to trust the 
promises which He whispers through our 
conscience ; this we can do, and we ought to 
do. Every scholar who is also a religious 
man must have felt it, — must be aware how 
apt he is to approach the simplest spiritual 
truths as a critic, not as a simple learner. 
And yet he feels that when all is said and 
done, it is trust, not criticism, that the soul 
lives by. If he is ever to get beyond the 
mere outer precinct and pass within the holy 
place, he must put off his critical apparatus, 
and enter as a simple contrite-hearted man. 
Not as men of science, not as critics, not as 
philosophers, but as little children, shall we 
enter into the kino;dom of heaven. '' There- 
fore," says Leighton, speaking of filial prayer, 
" many a poor unlettered Christian far out- 
strips your school rabbis in this attainment, 
because it is not effectually taught in these 
lower academies." 



128 HINDRANCES TO 

These are reflections needed perhaps at all 
times bv those immersed in thouo:ht and 
study, — never more needed than now. 
Numberless voices, through newspaper, pam- 
phlet, periodical, from platform and pulpit, 
are telhng us that we are in the midst of a 
transition age, so loudly that the dullest can- 
not choose but hear. It is a busy, restless 
time, eager to cast off the old and reach for- 
ward to the new. It needs no diviner to tell 
us that this century will not pass without a 
great breaking up of the dogmatic structures 
that have held ever since the Reformation or 
the succeeding age. From many sides at 
once a simplifying of the code, a revision of 
the standards, is being demanded. I will 
not ask whether this is good or bad, desirable 
or not. It is enough that it is inevitable. 
From such a removal of old landmarks two 
opposite results may arise. Either it may 
make faith easier by taking cumbrous forms 
out of the way, — it may make the direct 
approach to Christ and God simple and more 
natural, — may, in fact, bring God nearer to 
the souls of men, — or it may remove Him 
to a greater distance, and make life more 
completely secular. Which shall the result 
be ? This depends for each of us on the way 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 129 

vre use the new state of things, on the pre- 
paredness or non-preparedness of heart with 
whicli we meet it. Often it is seen that 
great changes, which in the long-run turn to 
the good of the community, bring suffering 
and grievous loss on their way to many an 
individual. And a time of transition, when 
the old bonds are being broken up, is a time 
of trial to the spirits of men. At such a time, 
in anxiety but not in despair, we ask, how is 
the old piety to live on through all changes 
into the new world that is to be? If the 
outward framework that helped to strengthen 
our fathers is being removed, the more the 
need that we should cleave to the inward, 
the vital, the spiritual communion with Him 
on whom the soul lives. Secular and 
worldly common sense will discuss in news- 
papers, literary criticism in magazines, these 
momentous changes ; but such talk touches 
only the outside aspect of them, and cannot 
discern what is essential or what is not. 
Even refined intellectuality cannot much 
help us here. That which passes safely 
through all changes is the tender conscience, 
the trusting heart, the devout mind. Let 
us seek these, and the disciplines which 

strengthen them. College learning is good, 
9 



130 HINDRANCES TO 

but not all the learnino- of all the Universi- 
ties of Europe can compensate for the loss 
of that which the youth reared in a religious 
home has learned in childhood at his mother's 
knee. 

In all the best men you meet, perhaps the 
thing that is most peculiar about them is the 
child's heart they bear within the man's. 
However they have differed in other respects, 
in their tempers, gifts, attainments, in this 
they agreed. With those things they were, 
so to speak,, clothed upon, — this was their 
very core, their essential self. And this 
child's heart it is that is the organ of faith, 
trust, heavenly communion. It is a very 
simple thing, so simple that worldly men are 
apt either not to perceive or to despise it. 
And young persons when they first grow up, 
and enter the world, are tempted to make lit- 
tle of it. They think that now they are men 
they must put away childish things, must 
learn the world, and conform to its ways and 
estimates of things. 

But the ra Tov vrjTTLov, the childish things, 
which St. Paul put away, belong to a quite 
different side of child-nature from tlie TratStW, 
the little child which our Lord recommended 
for our example. 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 131 

We should try, as we grow up into man- 
hood, and get to know the world, to have 
this simphcity of childhood kept fresh Avithin 
us, still at the centre. If we allow the world 
to rob us of it, as so many do, in boyhood, 
even before manhood begins, we may be^ sure 
that the w^orld has nothing equal to it to give 
us instead. And they who may have for a 
time lost it, or had it obscured or put into 
abeyance by contact with men, cannot too 
soon seek to have it restored within them. 
And the only way to preserve this good 
thing, or have it, if lost, renewed, is to open 
the heart to simple, truthful communion with 
God and Christ, and try to bring the heart 
ever closer and closer to Him. 

That this is intended to be our very in- 
most nature, the way in which we are reared 
by Providence seems to show. For all the 
first years of our life He surrounds us wdth 
the warm charities of home, — by these He 
calls out all our earliest, deepest, most per- 
manent feelings. School, college, the world 
follow, but their* influences, great as they are, 
never penetrate down, at least in natural 
characters, so deep as those first affections. 
And then in mature life, the home of child- 
hood is generally, if possible, reproduced in 



132 HINDRANCES TO SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 

a home of our own, in which all the early 
affections are once more renewed, enhanced 
by the thoughtfulness that hfe has brought. 

Let me close with reading what Pascal has 
left as his Profession of Faith : — 

" I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved 
it. I love w^ealth, because it gives me the 
means . of assisting the wretched. I keep 
faith with all men. I do not render evil to 
those who do it to me ; but I desire a state 
for them like to my own, in which I receive 
neither evil nor good from the hand of man. 
I endeavor to be just, trnthful, sincere, and 
faithful to all men ; and I have a tenderness 
of heart for those to whom God has imited 
me more closely; and. whether I am alone, 
or in the sight of men, in all my actions I 
have in sight God, who must judge them, 
and to whom I have consecrated them all. 

'^ These are my sentiments, and I bless all 
the days of my life my Redeemer, who has 
put them into me, and who, from a man full 
of weakness, misery, concupiscence, pride, 
and ambition, has made a man exempt frojn all 
these evils by the strength of His grace, to 
which all the glory of it is due, since I have 
in myself nothing but misery and error," 



LECTURE V. 

RELIGION COMBINING CULTURE WITH ITSELF. 

The truth which I tried to bring' before 
you in my last lecture, though a very obvious 
one, is yet sometimes forgotten. It was this : 
To discern and judge rightly of spiritual 
truth is not mainly the work of the logical 
understanding, nor of rough and round com- 
rnon sense. To do this requires that another 
capacity be awake in a man, — a spiritual 
apprehension, or, call it by what name you 
may, a deeper, more internal light, which 
shall be behind the understanding, as it 
were, informing and illuminating it. For 
otherwise the understanding, however pow- 
erful or acute, attains not to spiritual truth. 
This power of spiritual apprehension we saw 
is, though rrot identical with the moral nature, 
more akin to it, — belongs more to this side 
of our hieing than to the intellectual. It 
contains the moral nature, and something 
more than what ordinarily comes under that 
name. Like every other power in man, it 



184 COMBINATION OF 

is capable of growth and cultivation. "We 
can, if we choose, starve and kill it, or we 
can, by submitting it to its proper discipline 
and bringing it into contact with its proper 
objects, deepen and expand it. Care, watch- 
fulness, earnest cultivation it requires ; but 
that cultivation is of a diiferent kind*, as its 
objects are different, from that which trains 
the .intellect and the imagination, and it can- 
not be directly taught in colleges and schools. 
The belief that the spiritual faculty is dif- 
ferent from the logical and scientific faculty, 
led me to notice some of the hindrances 
which our habits as students often put in the 
way of spiritual vision and religious growth. 
The mental tendencies which I noted were 
among the most obvious, those that meet us 
at the very tfhreshold. There are several 
others more recondite, wdiich I should have 
liked to notice ; but to this branch of the sub- 
iect enough of time has been mven. The 
more welcome task awaits me to-day of speak- 
ing for a little, not of the hindrances, but of 
the helps towards spiritual knowledge. 

The capacity of spiritual apprehension — 
that is, the power to apprehend spiritual 
truths- — is, I believe, latent in all men. 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 135 

Persons differ in the amount of their ca- 
pacity, or rather in their readiness to receive 
or to reject these things ; but that the capacity 
is in all men, dim, almost dormant it may be, 
yet really there incipiently, one cannot doubt. 
Whether' these latent elements shall grow 
and live and become powerful within us, or 
be stifled, crushed, extinguished, depends in 
some measure on circumstances which we 
cannot control, — such as our home training, 
our companions, our education, our tempta- 
tions ; but in some large measure also it de- 
pends on our own choice. 

Since this is so, since so much lies in our 
power as to what we shall actually become 
in this the deepest part of our being, it be- 
comes an important inquiry how we ought to 
deal each with ourselves, and how we can 
best help others in this respect. 

First, then, it is quite certain that if from 
childhood men were to beo;in to follow the 
first intimations of conscience, honestly to 
obey them and carry them out into act, the 
power of conscience would be so strength- 
ened and improved within them, that it 
would soon become, what it evidently in- 
tended to be, " a connecting principle be- 
tween the creature and the Creator." This 




136 COMBINATION OF 

light that h'ghteth every man, if any were 
to foUow it consistently, would soon lead a 
man up and on to a clear and full knowledge 
of God, and to the formation of the Divine 
imao-e within himself. But none do so fol- 
low these heavenward promptings, all more 
or less disobey them, thwart them, and so dim 
and distort their spiritual light. A few there 
are, however, who, though not free from the 
inborn obliquity, do begin, earlier than most 
men, to cherish conscience, and, with what- 
ever declensions, do on the whole make it 
their main endeavor to obey it. And these 
are led on quickly. and early to the serener 
heights whence they see spiritual truths more 
clearly, vividly, and abidingly than ordinary 
«i^n. But this is not the case with the most. 
Even those who mav never have fallen into 
open and flagrant sin, have yet made not duty 
but incHnation their first guide, have tried 
to strike innumerable compromises between 
self-pleasing and duty, in which self has had 
much the best of the bargain, — have at best 
tried ''to please themselves without displeas- 
ing God." And so by going on in this self- 
deceiving, double-minded way, they have 
weakened not strengthened, dimmed not 
brightened, the original light that was with- 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 137 

in them. So conscience has not to them been 
an open avenue of communication upward, 
a direct access to God. 

Without, however, dwelhng on the innumer- 
able shades and ways of declension, one thing 
remains true for all. Whatever our past life 
may have been, at whatever point of life and 
progress we may be standing, if we would npt 
destroy what we have still left of spiritual 
apprehension, if we have any desire to grow 
in spiritual growth, the first thing to be done 
is to face conscience, — to be entirelv honest 
with ourselves, to cease from excusinn; our- 
selves to ourselves, cease from subterfuges 
and self-deceptions, and bring ourselves, our 
desires, our past lives, our aims, our charac- 
ters into the light of conscience and of God, 
and there desire to have them searched, 
sifted, cleansed. 

To be thus perfectly single-hearted and 
candid is, I know, a most difficult attainment. 
Entire candor and honesty regarding our- 
selves, instead of being the first, is one of the 
last and highest attainments of a perfectly 
fashioned character. But though this is true, 
it is also the beginning of all well-doing; 
without some measure of it, even though 
w^eak and unsteady, no good thing can begin. 



138 COMBINATION OF 

We must be honest with ourselves, desire to 
know the truth about ourselves, desire, how- 
ever faintly, to be better than we are, or 
there is no bettering possible for us. But if 
this desire is in us, it is the germ out of 
which all good may come. The first honest 
acting out of this desire will be to face con- 
SQience, as I said, to walk according to the 
light we have, to do the immediate thing we 
know to be right, and then more light will 
follow. We shall desire to get beyond mere 
notional religion, and to lay a living hold on 
living truth. And the way to do this is to 
take our common thoughts of right and 
wrono; into the lio-ht of God, and connect 
them with Him, and act them out in the 
conviction that they come straight from Him. 
One of the first results of such an effort to 
act up to conscience will be the conviction 
that there is in us something essentially 
wrong inwardly, which of ourselves we are 
quite unable to set right, — that to do this is 
a task to which our own internal resources 
are wholly inadequate. And the more hon- 
estly the attempt is made, the more entirely 
will a man feel that the powers of restoration 
he needs must lie out of himself, above him- 
self. Of such powers no tidings reach him 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 139 

from any quarter of the universe, save only 
from the Revelation that is in Christ.^ 

If, then, this prime essential condition of 
all spii*itual progress be present, namely, 
an awakened conscience, there are various 
means by which the life begun can be fed 
and nourished. Here again I must repeat 
that I am unwilling to trespass on the duty 
of the Christian minister,' but I trust you will 
bear with me, if I briefly mention a few 
things which perhaps you do not usually as- 
sociate with college instruction. For other- 
wise I should not be able to speak the truth 
on this matter, and I believe that the reality 
of the things of religion suffers greatly from 
their being confined solely to the church and 
pulpits, and being considered unseasonable 
and out of taste if even alluded to by laymen 
and at other times. / 

1. The first means, then, of spiritual 
growth is Prayer ; not the repeating of forms 
merely, nor the saying of words, but the hon- 
est, sincere, often voiceless prayer, w^hich 
comes into real contact, heart to heart, with 
Him to whom we pray. To pray thus is not 
the easy thing we are sometimes apt to im- 
agine. It is not learned in a day, but is the 
1 Note VII. 



.140 COMBINATION OF 

result of many an earnest, devout effort. It 
requires the whole being to concur, — the 
understanding, the emotions, the will, the 
spirit. It is an energy of the total soul, far 
beyond any mere intellectual act. But to 
the spiritual life it is as absolutely essential 
as mbreathing of fresh air is to the lungs and 
the bodily life. 

2. Then there is Meditation, — the quiet, 
serious, devout fixing of the mind, from time 
to time, on some great truth or fact of re- 
ligion, holding it before the mind steadily, 
silently brooding over it till it becomes warm 
and vital, and melts into us. This habit of 
devout meditation is recommended, by good 
men who have practiced it, as eminently 
useful. But it is not much in keeping with 
the tone of the present day. For with all 
our pretensions to enlightenment, are we not 
now a talking, desultorj^, rather than a med- 
itative generation ? Whatever other mental 
acquirements we may possess, we are cer- 
tainly not rich in 

" The ha vest of the quiet eve, 
Tliat sleeps and broods on its own heart.'* 

And vet, without somethino; of this medita- 
tive habit, it is impossible to lay living hold 
of the first truths of morality and religion. 



RELIGION AND CULTURE, l4l 

It were well, therefore, if we should betimes 
turn aside from life's bustle, and " impose a 
sabbath " on our too busy spirits, that the 
things of sense, being for a while shut out, 
the unseen things may come into us with 
power. 

3. Again, few things are more helpful 
than the studv of the lives of the most emi- 
nent Christians from the bemnnino;. The 
Roman Church has her lives of the saints, 
some of them of doubtful authenticity. The 
Universal Church should have a catena 
of lives of the best men of each age, from 
primitive times till now. It would include 
the saintly spirits of all ages, from all coun- 
tries, men of all ranks, of every variety 
of temper, taken from the most diverse 
churches. Such a catena would be the 
strongest of all external evidences. It would 
exhibit Christianity, not so much as a system 
of doctrines, but as a power of life, adequate 
to subdue the strongest wills, to renew the 
darkest hearts, to leaven the most opposite 
characters. If an intimate study of it were 
more common, how much would it do to heal 
divisions, to deepen and enlarge the sympa- 
thies of all Christians, by the exhibition of 
their common spiritual ancestry ! 



142 COMBINATION OF 

4. But if such an intimacy with good men 
gone is beneficial, not less so is intercourse 
with the living, our elders, or companions 
more advanced than ourselves. They will 
understand what I mean, who have ever 
known any one in whom the power of Chris- 
tian love has had its perfect work. As from 
time to time they turned to these, did they 
not find, from the irregularities of their own 
minds, and the distractions of the world, 
shelter and a soothing calm ? " The con- 
stant transpiration " of their characters came 
home with an evidence more direct, more 
intimate, more persuasive than any other. 
" Whatever is right, whatever is wrong, in 
this perplexing world," one thing they felt 
must be right : to live as these lived, to be 
of the spirit they were of. Impressions of 
this kind affect us more powerfully in youth 
than in later years, yet they are not denied 
us even in mature manhood. Happy are 
those who have known some such friends. 
They are not- confined to any age or station, 
but may be found among poor men and un- 
learned, as readily as among the most gifted. 
Let us cherish the society of such persons 
.while we may, and the remembrance of them 
when that intercourse is over. For we mav 



RELIGION AND CULTURE, 143 

be quite sure of this, that life has nothino- 
else to give more pure, more precious, than 
such companionship. 

5. But the last, and by far the most pow- 
erful, of all outward aids to spiritual growth, 
is to bring the heart and spirit into close con- 
tact with that Life which is portrayed by the 
four Evangelists. But before we can do this 
satisfactorily, some may say, we must settle 
a host of difficult problems, fight out our way 
through a whole jungle of vexed and intricate 
questions. '' One knows the interminable 
discussions of modern criticisms on the orio;in, 
the authenticity, and the mutual relations of 
the four Gospels. But for our present pur- 
pose we can leave all these questions on one 
side. The authenticitv of the evano-elistic 
teaching will always prove itself better by its 
own nature and self-evidencing power, than 
by any criticism of the documents." To say 
this is not to disparage criticism, which has 
its own place and use. But that place is not 
the central or vital one. Criticism is not re- 
ligion, and by no process can it be substituted 
for it. It is not the critic's eye, but the child's 
heart, that most truly discerns the counte- 
nance that looks out from the pages of the 
Gospels. If we would not miss or distort 



144 COMBINATION OF 

that image, let us come to it with an open 
heart, feeling our need of help. Such a way 
of studying the Gospels, simple, open-hearted, 
reverent, is the truest, healthiest, most pen- 
etratino; means of feedino; the divine life. 
When once by long, single-hearted, steadfast 
contemplation the impression has graven it- 
self within, it is the strongest, it is the most 
indelible that we know. Dogmatic convic- 
tions may change, criticism may shift its- 
ground, but that image will abide, rooted in 
the deepest seats of moral life. Whatever 
storms may shake us in a troubled time, this 
anchor, if any, will ''hold." Try before all 
things, especially while you are young and 
open to impressions, to bring understanding, 
imagination, heart, conscience, under the 
power of that master vision. That image, 
or rather that Person, so human, yet so en- 
tirely divine, has a power to fill the imagina- 
tion, to arrest the affections, to deepen and 
purify the conscience, which nothing else in 
the world has. No end so worthy of your 
literary and philosophic training here, as to 
enable you to do this more firmly and intel- 
ligently. All criticism which tends to make 
the lineaments of that countenance shine out 
more impressively shall be welcome. What- 



RELIGIOS AND CULTURE, 145 

ever tends to dim it, or remove it to a dis- 
tance, we sliall disregard. For we know 
witli a certainty which far transcends any 
certainty of criticism, that He is true. 

But if we would deepen and perpetuate in 
ourselves the impressions thus made, we must 
remtinber that the surest way is to act on 
them. There is, I fear, a tendency in all of 
us to desire clear convictions and vivid feel- 
ings about these things, and to rest there, 
content with convictions and feelings. And 
so they come to nauo;ht. If they are not to 
be merely head notions or evanescent feelings, 
they must be taken into the will, and pass 
out into our actions. This is what our Lord 
said : If any man will do His will, he shall 
know of the doctrine whether it be of God. 
Knowledge is to follow doing, not precede it. 
In. order to understand, we must commence 
by putting into practice what we already 
know. '' Unfortunately all ages and parties 
have gone to work the other way, adjourn- 
ino; the doino; of the doctrine, hastenino; to 
busy themselves with the theory of it." 
And each individual man must be aware of 
this tendency in himself, the desire for a fully 
mapped-out system of truth, which, after he 
has got it, he will begin to think of practic- 

10 



146 COMBINATION OF 

ing. But we shall never get it thus. To do 
what we know to be right first, however lit- 
tle that maj be, to follow out the light we 
have, tliis is the only way to get more light. 
Whatever good thoughts or feelings we have, 
we must try earnestly to embody them in 
act, if we wish to grow. But to will and do 
is so much harder than to speak and specu- 
late, and even feel. This is the reason we 
turn aside from the former, and give ourselves 
so -much to the latter. But it is in vain we 
do so. In spiritual things there is no road 
to hio;her lig-ht without obedience to con- 
science. This gives solidity to a man's char- 
acter, and assurance to his faith, as nothing 
else does.. 

I have dwelt on this, the spiritual side of 
our subject, at what may seem disproportion- 
ate length. But I have done so from the 
belief that it is an aspect of truth which at 
present is being too much disregarded by the 
most ardent Culturists, and by some also of 
the strono;est advocates of g-eneral education. 
And so by losing sight of it, or willfully re- 
jecting it, not only is the whole economy of 
the human spirit deranged, but even the 
purely intellectual faculties and objects are 



i 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 147 

deprived of their highest objects. Even 
among those who do not take the entirely- 
secular view of life, and shut out relio-jon 
altogether, there seems to be a tendency to 
expect religion to come as the last result of 
a large and laborious culture, — that, in short, 
we may end with it, but are not to begin 
it, — that we must first learn all that science 
can teach us of the outer world of nature, 
then all that philosophy can teach us of the 
the inner world of man, then all that history, 
and the philosophy of history, can teach us 
of the progress of the race, and then, as the 
last consummation, as the copestone on this 
great edifice of knowledge, theology may 
possibly be built. And when the true theol- 
ogy has got itself achieved, there may come 
religion; that is, we may proceed to believe 
and act on it. I do not say that this view is 
put forth in so many words, but it seems to 
be latent in many minds, and implied as a 
first principle in much that is said in the 
present time. Not, of course, by the multi- 
tude, — it is not among them that such a 
view would prevail, — but it is entertained 
by many of those who are reputed " advanced 
thinkers," as the phrase goes, and from them 
it filters down to the platforms and the news- 



148 COMBINATION OF 

papers, and helps to swell that most weari- 
some chorus of self-laudation which is ever- 
more rising up about this most wonderful and 
enlightened age. Instead, however, of com- 
ing as the last consummation, I believe it 
will be found that, in far the greatest num- 
ber of men who ever become really religious, 
the sense of God is awakened early, a germ 
of life growing and expanding from childhood, 
round which learning and culture gathered 
afterwards. This I believe to be the natural, 
and by far the most frequent, history of the 
best men. If, on the other hand, we post- 
pone spiritual things till we have completed, 
or even far advanced, our investigations, 
tliere is great danger that they will never 
come at all. I do not say that some men, a 
^eiry few, may not have awakened to the 
practical sense of God late in life, and only 
after long wanderings in the world of thought 
without Him. God has many ways of bring- 
ing men's spirits to Himself, and we dare not 
venture to say He shall lead any man in this 
way and not in that. Only this we can say, 
that for men to arrive at divine truth as the 
last stage in a long process of culture and in- 
vestigation, is not His usual way of leading 
uaeii) and that when it does take place it comes 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 14& 

not in the way of gradual sequence, not as it 
were the last step in a long induction. Not 
as a natural sequence, but rather as a con- 
vulsion, will such revelation be likely to come, 
with a confession of failure, with a rending of 
old habits of thought and of godless associa- 
tions, with the acknowledgment that much 
of life has been wasted, and that the chief 
thincr Culture has tauo;ht is that not in itself 
is God to be found. 

Speculation, we may believe, "reaches its 
final rest and home in faith," but the faith 
has generally been present in the heart before 
the speculation began, and has accompanied 
it more or less consciouslv throuo;h all its 
travellings. Where the faith has only ap- 
peared in the end, it will be because specula- 
tion has acknowledged itself unable livingly 
to lay hold on God, and has resigned the 
searcher over to another higher than itself. 

The practical upshot of all I have said is 
this : Do not let us adjourn being religious 
till we have become learned. It may be to 
some a tempting, but it is a dangerous exper- 
iment. If we wish really to be good, and to 
know the good, we should begin early, begin 
at once. 

I may have dwelt too long on this. But it 



y> 



150 COMBINATION OF 

is because I see so strong a tendency abroad 
to beo;in at the wrono; end, to deal first and 
prominently with the intellectual side of 
things, and to expect all good from that, that 
I feel constrained to urge on all who hear 
me, especially on the young, to avoid this, to 
bco-in as well as to end with God revealed in 
Christ, and communion with Him. * So shall 
they have their whole natures grounded, 
established, braced for the stern siftings 
which in this age assuredly await us. 

It is high time now to ask how Culture 
and Religion act and react on each other. 
Side glances have been taken at this subject 
throughout these lectures. To give a full 
and systematic view of all their relations I 
have not proposed, even if I had the power. 
A few words, however, must be said. 

]f, as we saw. Religion, or the impulse in 
man to seek God, and Culture, or the im- 
pulse in man to seek his own highest perfec- 
tion, both come from the same Divine source, 
it is clear that as thev are in themselves — 
that is, as God sees them — there can be no 
opposition, there must be perfect harmony 
between them. Botli together, they must 
be workino; towards that full revelation of 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 161 

God and that good of man towards which we 
believe creation moves. But as soon as we 
rerard them not absolutelv, but as man has 
made them, that is, as thej have appeared 
in history, immediately we find that they 
have not always conspired harmoniously 
towards one great end, that for long periods 
they have moved on separate Ihies, that 
sometimes they have come into actual col- 
lision. And the reason of this is obvious. 
Few men can take in more than one point of 
view at a time, none can habitually embrace 
and maintain a universal and absolute view 
of things. And so it has come to pass that 
these two powers, as they start from differ- 
ent centres, have continued each to work on 
under the impulse of the leading idea which 
gave it ^ birth, without taking much account 
of the idea which animated the other. Cul- 
ture, with its eye fixed on man's perfection, 
has been busy with the means that tend 
towards this, that is appropriating the large 
results which human etibrt, thought, and ex- 
perience have gathered from past centuries. 
Religion, on tlie other hand, starting, not 
from the view of man's perfection, but of 
God's existence, in the consciousness of this, 
however dim and unenlightened, has been 



152 COMBINATION OF 

entirely absorbed in the results that flow out 
of this relation, — the sense of deptnclence, 
the duty of obedience and self-surrender, and 
man's total inability to meet this ckiim. 
And in its absorption it has, for light, looked' 
— inward, to the monitions, however ob- 
scure, of conscience ; outward, to whatever 
aid nature and history supply ; upward, to 
that light, higher than nature, which has 
come direct from 'heaven. And thus each, 
self-en wrapt, has taken little account of its 
neighbor. 

But if these two forces are to cease from 
their isolation, and combine, as we may hope, 
towards some better result than the world 
has yet seen, the question arises. Are they 
to. work as two coordinate and equipollent 
powers, or is one to be subordinate to the 
other, and if so, which ? To this question 
the old answer is still, we feel, the true one. 
To Reiio;ion belono;s of rio-ht the sovereio;n 
place, and this because it is a more direct 
emanation from the Divine source ; it finds 
its response in the deeper places of our be- 
ing; it is the earlier manifestation in the 
history of the race ; the earlier in the life of 
the individual, and it will be the last. But 
though its place is primary, it cannot be inde- 



RELIGION AND CULTURE, 153 

pendent of thought and knowledge ; nay, the 
religion of each age must, hi a large measure, 
be conditioned by the state of knowledge ex- 
isting in that age. * We see this in the past 
history of religion, and we see how fruitless, 
I should rather say how disastrous, have 
been the effects, when religion has tried to 
close itself ao-ainst the risino* tide of knowl- 
edge. ' And the lesson which the past 
teaches, religious men would do well to learn, 
and keep an open side to the influx of all the 
new knowredc;:e which each ao;e achieves, to 
appropriate this, aud absorb it into their relig- 
ious convictions. So far from being jealous 
or suspicious of ascertained scientific truths, 
or even indifferent to them, they should feel 
that such prejudices are wrong, that they are 
bound to welcome all such truths, being sure 
that, in as far as they are truths, God means 
them to be known, and wills them to be in- 
corporated into our thoughts of Him and of 
His ways. 

And here I cannot better express my own 
thought than by quoting words which Bishop 
Temple lately spoke on this subject. ''I 
have," he said, in a public address delivered 
in his own diocese, " a real conviction that all 
this study of science, rightly pursued, comes 



154 COMBINATION OF 

from the providence of God ; that it is in 
accordance with His will that we should 
study His works, and that as He has given 
us a spiritual revelation in His Word, so also 
has He given us a natural revelation in His 
creation. I am convinced that there is noth- 
ing to lose, but everything to gain, by a true 
and careful study of God's works ; that the 
more light we can get, the more cultivation 
of our understandino;, and the more thorouo;h 
discipline of our intellect by the study of all 
this which God has scattered in such wonder- 
ful profusion around us, so much the better 
shall we be able not only to serve Him in 
our vocation, but to understand the meaning 
of His spiritual revelations. I am convinced 
that all light of whatever kind is good, and 
comes from God ; that all knowledo;e comes 
from Him, and can be used in His service ; 
that nothing which really adds to the knowl- 
edge of the world is for a moment to be de- 
spised ; that, on the contrary, it should be 
the effort of all who undertake to instruct 
their brethren in relio-ious truth, to show that 
wx feel that religious truth and secular truth 
are not only capable of being reconciled, but 
really come from the same God who is the 
God of all truth. Therefore, so far from de- 



RELIGlOh AND CULTURE, 155 

sirino; that there should be divorce between 
these two, I should wish, on the contrary, 
that every effort should be made by all who 
are concerned in religious teaching, to per- 
vade the study of science with their own re- 
ligious feeling ; to study science with the 
constant recollection of that God whose 
w^orks are the subject of science ; to study 
science with minds perpetually uplifted 
towards Him who is the author both of or- 
der and of beauty ; to study the laws of na- 
ture with a perpetual recollection of Him 
who ordained them. 1 know that it is not 
only possible, but that both science and re- 
ligion will gain by the union." 

The truth enforced in these words is so 
obvious that hardly any one will think of 
directly denying it, howev-er little many may 
be ready to act on it. One thing, however, I 
would have you observe, that they presup- 
pose the thought of God taken into science, 
and not first found there. It mav be well to 
dwell a little on this, and to illustrate tliese 
general views somewhat more in detail. For, 
stated generally, the truth ^bove expressed 
may sound like a truism. It is only when 
we come to particular points that the diffi- 
culties really begin. 



156 COMBINATION OF 

It lies, we know, at the root of all religion, 
to believe that this system of things is really 
from God, that the Divine thought presided 
at its origin, and that the same is present 
upholding and carrying forward this beau- 
tiful order with wliich we are now encom^ 
passed. Any so-called conclusions of science 
which deny this, and suggest another origin 
of the world than the will and thouo;ht of 
God, religion must reject as subversive of its 
first principle. But, this granted, religion 
must leave it to science to discover what is 
the method wliich the Divine thought has 
followed, what have been the processes by 
which it has evolved the order we now be- 
hold. All facts really established by science 
religion must receive, nay, more, ought to 
welcome, and incorporate into its own view 
of the universe, allowing them to modify that 
view in as far as this may be necessarv. In 
refusing to do this, in looking with suspicion, 
if not with positive hostility, on the fresh dis- 
coveries of each age, religious persons, since 
the days of Galileo downwards, have often 
erred, and given just grounds for complaint 
to the advocates of science. On the other 
hand, it must be said that scientific, or rather 
quasi-scientific, persons have sometimes been 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 157 

hasty to thrust on religion for acceptance a 
number of crude hypotheses, as if they were 
scientific verities. For the solid body of. 
science seems to throw out before it a pre- 
tentious penumbra of hypotheses and pre- 
suppositions, which often, in the name of 
science, call on religion to surrender at dis- 
cretion. It is not, however, the really scien- 
tific, the original discoverers, who for the 
most part deal in these. Such men dwell in 
the solid bodv of science, and are careful not 
to stray beyond it. The penumbra I speak 
of is mainly tenanted by another sort, — per- 
sons of small scientific capacity, but of busy 
minds, greedy of novelties, and rapid to ex- 
temporize big philosophies out of the mate- 
rials which science furnishes. From such 
comes the assertion, often heard nowadavs, 
that miracle is impossible. This, however, 
though urged in the name of science, is no 
scientific truth at all. It is only a large and 
pretentious generalization, bred no doubt out 
of the scientific atmosphere which more or 
less envelops even popular thought, but 
wholly unwarranted by genuine science. 
When religion is called on to accept this 
nostrum of the destructive critics, it is not 
prejudice or narrowness, but truth, that com- 



158 COMBINATION OF 

pels her to meet it with a direct denial. 
Such an assertion has nothing to support it 
but a j!9n(?n assumption ; it is not warranted 
bv anytliino; we know, and is foreimi to the 
moderation of true science. Nothing that 
has been ascertained by physical inquiry, 
nothing that mental philosophy has made 
good, would justify such dogmatism. It im- 
plies the possession of a much wider, more 
entire knowledge of the universe than any 
yet attained, or perhaps that will be attained 
in our present state. Religion, therefore, is 
at one with sound philosophy in refusing to 
admit such an assumption. And this quite 
apart from that other consideration, that if 
true it would relegate to the region of anyth 
one half of the Gospel histories, and render 
the other half of no authority if it were im- 
bedded in such a mass of fable. The state- 
ment, then, that miracles are in themselves 
impossible, being a wholly groundless assump- 
tion, the question of their actual occurrence 
becomes one of purely historical evidence. 
What that evidence is has been often stated, 
and will be restated from time to time 
according as the shifting views of each age 
require. But perhaps men's belief in that 
evidence can never be determined entirely on 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 159 

objective grounds. The strength of the evi- 
dence will always be differently estimated by 
different minds, but owing to other considera- 
tions, and especially according as they have 
a latent belief or disbelief in their possibility 
and likelihood. 

Again, when we are told that to the mod- 
ern scientific sense the idea of God the 
Father resolves itself into that of '^ the uni- 
versal order," or into "that stream of ten- 
dency by which all things strive to fulfill the 
law of their being," how is religion to deal 
w^ith this assertion ? Or again, when instead 
of Christ we are offered as the modern equiv- 
alent " an absent and unseen power of good- 
ness ? " It is not resistance to modern in- 
telligence, but defense of the very "core" 
of spiritual life, that makes religion withstand 
such intrusions of so-called science or criti- 
cism into her own inmost recesses. Once 
again we must repeat, the things of the 
Spirit are truly apprehended only by the 
spirit and the conscience of man. If God is 
known then only truly when the heart com- 
munes with Him, substitutes for religious 
entities which would make such communion 
impossible are by this very fact disproved. 
Those abstractions which criticism and phi- 



160 COMBINATION OF 

losophy, divorced from the Spirit, offer, are 
but pale and lifeless shadows. The things 
of revehxtion, the truths which St. John and 
St. Paul lived by, and all Christian men 
since have tried to live by, when pared down 
by these modern processes, are extinct. No 
doubt science and philosophy have some- 
thing to do with shaping the intellectual 
forms in which spiritual truths shall be ex- 
pressed. But when criticism pretends to 
penetrate into the inner essence of spiritual 
truths, and to supply us with modern equiv- 
alents for them, it is then time to remind it 
that it is overstepping the limits which are 
proper to it. For it is to the spirit and con- 
science of men that spiritual truth makes its 
appeal, and by these in the last resort it 
must be apprehended. It will be said, I 
know. How are we to ascertain what really 
are those realities to which the conscience 
and the spirit of men witness, seeing that 
vrith regard to these men are so divided ? 
I am aware of the difficulty. Yet we can- 
not in deference to it recede from the first 
principle, that spiritual things are to be spir- 
itually discerned ; that the coming home of 
a religious truth to the spirit of a man, and 
fitting into it, is to that man the highest evi- 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 161 

dence of its truth, and tliat this is tlie thing 
we sliould each seek first. He who has felt 
the self-evidencing power of truth will kno\y 
this to be its best proof. Where this is not 
present, intellectual arguments will do little, 
as these may be adduced equally on that side 
or on this. It may be that we have felt little 
of th's evidencing power of truth, — that there 
are few truths which have so come home to 
us. But all men have felt some measure of 
it. They have at least their sense of right 
and wrono; in its more obvious bearino;s. 
Whoso shall try to live and act on this, so* 
using the small light he has, he shall receive 
more. 

If it still be urged, Such inward conviction 
is at best personal to the individual w^ho has it, 
we wish for some test of religious truth which 
shall be impersonal and universal ; it may be 
replied, that while the highest evidence in 
the things of religion must necessarily rest 
on personal grounds, there are other tests 
more general, though of a secondary and sub- 
ordinate kind as far as cogency is concerned. 
Some such outward test may be found by 
observing what are those religious truths 
which the best, most s])iritually-minded men 

of all ages have chiefly laid to heart. As 
11 



162 COMBINATION OF 

Aristotle found a clew towards a moral stand- 
ard by taking the general suffrage of the 
morally wisest men, so may we do in some 
measure with regard to spiritual things. Still, 
though this may help us somewhat, in the 
last resort we must tall back on the truth 
that light is self-evidencing, — as light natu- 
ral, so light spiritual. Seeing, feeling is be- 
lieving, and the conviction thus produced 
must be an inward and personal thing, not 
readily nor adequately represented in the 
language of the intellect. To adopt the 
.words of a profound thinker, whom I have 
already quoted in these lectures, " An intel- 
lectual form our spiritual apprehensions must 
receive, that the demand of our intellectual 
nature may be met. But still that which is 
spiritual must be spiritually discerned, and I 
would not seek to recommend the doctrine 
of the atonement by what might be called 
brino-ino; it down to the level of the under- 
standing. I seek rather to raise the under- 
standing to that which is above it, and to 
that exercise of thought on spiritual things in 
which we feel ourselves brought near to 
what is divine and infinite, and made par- 
takers in the knowledge of the love which 
passeth knowledge." 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 163 

Or in the words of another great living 
teacher, belonging to a different school : — 
'' The inward witness to the truth lodcred in 
our hearts is a match for the most learned 
infidel or sceptic that ever lived. In spiritual 
thino;s, " the most acute of reasoners and 
most profound of thinkers, the most instructed 
in earthly knowledge, is nothing except he' 
has also within him the presence of the 
Spirit of truth. Human knowledge, though 
of great power when joined to a pure and 
humble faith, is of no power when opposed 
to it." I am aware that words like these, 
the " inward witness," " the witness of God's 
Spirit with man's spirit," may be used as 
catch-words in a way that makes them mean- 
ingless. But to this abuse they are liable 
only in common with all words expressive 
of high and spiritual things. When two 
such men as Dr. M'Leod Campbell and Dr. 
Newman, so differently trained, and with 
views so opposed in many things, combine to 
speak of " the witness of the Spirit," and to 
urge men to seek it, we may be quite sure 
that it is not any mere hearsay they are re- 
peating, but that they are speaking of some- 
which they know and feel to be a reality. 

Before passing entirely from this subject 



464 COMBINATION OF 

let me ask, Have faitli and worship to do 
with the known or with the unknown ? It 
is sometimes said that faith and worship only 
begin where knowledge ends. At other 
times we hear the exact contrary asserted, — 
tliat we cannot beheve any truth or worship 
any being of which we have not complete 
understanding, that in fact the circle of defi- 
nite knowledge and of possible faith are 
coextensive. These assertions seem both 
equally wide of the truth. It is in knowl- 
edge that faith and worship begin. We 
believe in God, and we worship God because 
of that which He has made known to us of 
Himself, in conscience first, and then more 
fully in revelation. Indeed, the very sim- 
plest acceptance of the truths of conscience, 
and the obeying of them, instead of choosing 
the pleasures of sense, is essentially of the 
nature of faith. And the knowledge thus 
brought home to the spirit, it feels to be pos- 
itive knowledge, — a cii'cle of light in which 
it. dwells. True it is that what is thus 
known reaches out on all sides to what is 
unknown, — the light is on all sides encom- 
passed with darkness. Bat the existence of 
the surrounding darkness does not make the 
light, such as it is, to be less light. And 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 165 

the faith and worship do not confine them- 
selves within the region of h'ght, but pass out 
into tlie outer circle, — go on from the known 
to tlie unknown. But in this they are doing 
no violence to reason ; nay, they are fulfilling 
the behest of the highest reason, which feels 
instinctively that while there is something 
of God which is within our ken, there must 
be much more which stretches bevond it. 
At the same time it feels equally assured 
that what lies beyond our present, perhaps 
even our future, vision, will never contradict 
that which is within it — that the true knowl- 
edge which the conscience and spirit now 
have will never be put to shame.^ 

But while these two elements, the kno^vn 
and the unknown, coexist, and we believe 
always will coexist, in faith and worship, the 
relation in which the two elements stand to 
each other must undero;o some chano;e with 
the widening of human knowledge and expe- 
rience. The moral conceptions of the race 
have been, in the course of ages, not radi- 
cally changed, but expanded, deepened, pu- 
rified by manv ao-encies. Our moral and 
religious ideas are not unaffected even by 
discoveries in reo-ions which at first sio-ht 
might seem most remote from them. 
1 Note VIII. 



166 COMBINATION OF 

The view of the universe as science lekds 
us to conceive it must react on our thoughts 
of God. Opening out before us the vast 
scale on which He works, and acquainting 
us with some of the methods of His working, 
it counteracts the limitations which are apt 
to arise from the human forms under which 
we think of Him. These forms are neces- 
sary and true. It is only because man has 
in himself some image of God that he can 
think of Him at all. But round this triie 
conception, so formed, there are apt to 
gather accretions from man's weakness and 
imperfection, to which the expansive views 
of science furnish a wholesome antidote. 
Again, do men's views of morality, as time 
goes on, get more deep, more just and hu- 
mane ? And to this result nothino;, I be- 
lieve, has so much contributed as eighteen 
centuries of Christianity, notwithstanding all 
the corruptions it has undergone. Then 
this improved moral perception, from what- 
ever sources derived, reacts directly on 
relio;ious belief, bv removino; obstructions 
that hide from us true views of God, and 
enabling us to think of Him more nearly as 
He is. As our conception of what true 
righteousness consists in improves, so. must 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 167 

our thouo:lit of Him who Is the Rio-hteous 
One. Idolatry has been said to be the pre- 
ferring of an Image of God which we feel to 
be Imperfect, but which has adapted and 
contracted Itself to our weakness, Instead of 
pressing on to the most perfect Image attain- 
able. In the light and heat of which our Im- 
perfections may be exposed and burned up. 
In short, It Is the retaining betvreen our 
hearts and God an Imperfect Image of Him, 
when It Is In our power to attain to a truer 
and more perfect vision. Every Increase of 
knowledge, whether gathered from history, 
or from the world without, or from the world 
within, may be a help towards forming a 
better conception of God's nature and of His 
ways, and ought to be so used. If we refuse 
either to Increase our knowledge that we 
may so use it, or neglect to turn It when In- 
creased to this Its highest purpose, and so 
are content to rest In less^ worthv thouo;hts 
of the Divine character, can we then excuse 
ourselves from the sin of idolatry ? One who 
really has confidence In truth — truth alike 
of science, of philosophy, of history, and of 
faith — win desire to see truth sought and 
advanced alono; all the diverse lines on which 
it is to be found. He may not see the point 



168 COMBINATION OF 

at which all these lines conver<xe, but he has 
perfect faith that they do converge, wliether 
he sees it or not. He can be satisfied with 
seeing but a little for a time, assured that he 
will yet see that little open on a fuller day. 
Believe in God, and bid all knowledge speed. 
Sooner or later the full harmony will reveal 
itself, the discords and contradictions disap- 
pear. 

Before closing this whole subject let me 
again repeat, what has been more than once 
hinted already, that Culture, when it will not 
accept its proper place as secondary, but sets 
up to be the guiding principle of life, forfeits 
that which mio;ht be its hiorhest charm. In- 
deed, even when it does not professedly turn 
its back on faith, yet if it claims to be para- 
mount, it will generally be found that it has 
cultivated every other side of man's nature 
but the devout one. There is no more for- 
lorn sio;]it than that of a man hio-hlv scifted, 
elaborately cultivated, with all the other 
capacities of his nature strong and active, but 
those of faith and reverence dormant. And 
this, be it said, is the pattern of man in 
which Culture, made the chief good, would 
most likely issue. On the other hand, when 
it assumes its proper place, illumined by faith, 



RELIGION AND CULTURE, 169 

and animated by devout aspiration, it ac- 
quires a dignity and depth which of itself it 
cannot attain. From faith it receives its 
highest and most worthy objects. It is chas- 
tened and purified from self-reference and 
conceit. It is prized no longer merely for its 
o^\\\ sake, or because it exalts the possessor 
of it, but because it enables him to be of use 
to others who have been less fortunate. In 
a word, it ceases to be self-isolated, and 
seeks to communicate itself as widely as it 
may. So Culture is transmuted from an in- 
tellectual attainment into a spiritual grace. 
This seems the light in which all who are 
admitted to a higher cultivation should learn 
to regard their endowments, whatever they 
be. Why is a small moiety, with no peculiar 
claim on society, so highly favored, taken for 
a wdiile from the dust and pressure of the 
world, and set apart in calm retreats like 
these, that here they may have access to the 
best learning of the time ? Not certainly 
that we should waste these precious hours in 
sloth, neither that we should' merely make 
our bread by learning ; not that we should 
seek and enjoy it as a selfish luxury, and, 
piquing ourselves on the enlightenment and 
refinement it brings, look down with disdain 



170 COMBINATION OF 

on the illiterate crowd ; but that, when we 
have been cultivated ourselves, we should go 
into the world and do what we can to impart 
to others whatever good thing we ourselves 
have received. There is a temptation inci- 
dent to the studious to seclude themselves 
from others, and lose themselves in their 
own thoughts and books. But we must try 
to resist this, and remember that since we 
have freely received, we are bound freely to 
give. This it is which makes Culture a 
really honorable and beneficent power. 

But there is a point of view from which 
this whole subject may be regarded, and I 
cannot close these lectures without alluding 
to it. There is a hio;her vantao;e-o:round, 
seen from which all these ba^ci'icino-s between 
Culture and Religion, man's (effort and God's 
working, would disappear, and all relations 
would at once fall into their right place. If 
there is reason to believe that God Himself 
is the great educator, and that His purpose, 
in all His dealings with men, is to educate 
them for Himself, what a new light would be 
thrown on all the ground over which we have 
travelled ! This is not the place to enter 
into an examination of the statements of 
Scripture which may bear on this subject. 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 171 

This only may be said, the belief that it is 
God's purpose to bring man out of the dark- 
ness of his evil and io-norance into the lio;ht 
of His own righteousness and love, seems 
every way consistent with what we know of 
His character as revealed in Christ. It is in 
harmony with the whole tenor of His life and 
teaching who said, " I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth, will draw all men unto myself." 
In this purpose there is a door of hope opened 
for all humanity. 

But then comes the thought that, though 
the door is opened, all do not enter by it. 
Multitudes never know that such a door 
exists ; many more know, and pass it by. 
That this should be God's purpose and yet 
that men should have the power to resist this 
purpose, to close their wills against it, this, 
next to the existence of evil at all, is the 
greatest of all mysteries. I have no Avish. 
indeed it is of no use, to try to conceal it ; it 
is a dark outstanding fact which must strike 
every one. If it is the Divine purpose to 
educate man, it is but too evident that a 
great multitude, perhaps the majority of men, 
leave this earth without, as far as we can 
see, the rudiments of the Divine education 
being even begun in them. Not to think of 



172 COMBINATION OF 

their case is impossible for any man, and the 
more generous and sympathetic any one is, 
the more heavily will it weigh on him. It 
must be owned that there are times w^hen 
this thought becomes to those who dwell on 
it very overpowering. There are some in 
whom it seems to '^ stagger " all their pow- 
ers of faith. Scripture offers no solution of 
this great perplexity, reason is helpless before 
it, human systems, in trying to explain it, 
only make it worse. What, then, are we to 
do ? We can but fall back on that ancient 
word of faith, '' Shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do rio;ht? " We must leave it to God 
Himself to solve, — assured that in the end 
He will solve it perfectly, will supremely 
justify Himself. 

Still, notwithstanding all that to us seems 
like failure, the belief in this purpose of God 
to train for Himself all who will, is, if we can 
but apprehend it, a thought full of strength 
and comfort. It is not only the highest hope, 
but the only real hope for humanity that ex- 
ists. It embraces everything that is good in 
the Culture theory, and how much more ! 
If Culture were what Culturists announce it 
to be, the one hope for men, what a very 
moiety of the race are they to whom it is 



RELIGION AND CULTURE, 173 

open ! A few prepared for it in youth, with 
health, leisure, some resources, have access to 
it. But what of all the others, even if the 
brio-htest dreams of educationists and ad- 
vanced politicians were to be fulfilled? The 
hope that is in Christianity, far short as the 
accomplishment has hitherto fallen of the 
ideal, is still in its very nature a hope for all, 
and it does actually reach multitudes whom 
Culture must leave out. How many are the 
occurrences of life which Culture can make 
nothing of, which it must abandon in dis- 
pair ? There are a thousand circumstances, 
I might say the larger portion of the stuff 
life is made of, out of which Culture can ex- 
tract nothing. What has it to say to '' pov- 
erty, destitution, and oppression, to pain and 
suffering, diseases long and violent, all that is 
frightful and revolting ? " What word can 
it speak to the heart-weary and desponding, 
those for whom life has been a failure, who 
have no more hope here ? But it is just 
where mere Culture is powerless that the 
faith that One higher than ourselves is train- 
ins; us, comes in most consolincrlv. Those 
untoward things, of which human effort can 
make nothing, failure, disappointment, sick- 
ness, have often ere now been felt by suf- 



174 COMBINATION OF 

ferers to be parts of the discipline by which 
He was training them for Himself. And this 
faitli has many a time had power to lighten, 
sometimes it has even irradiated, thino^s 
which else would have been insupportable. 
To adapt the words of Wordsworth to a 
purpose not alien to their own, — in faith 
a power abides which can feed 

*' A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire, 
From the incumbrances of mortal life, 
From error, disappointment, — nay, from guilt; 
And sometimes, so relenting Justice wilU, 
From palpable oppressions of despair.'* 

It is a '' many-chambered " school, that in 
which God trains. None are excluded from 
it, all are welcome. It has room for all gifts, 
all circumstances, all conditions. It makes 
allowance for defects and shortcomings which 
are ruin in this w^orld. Trained in this school 
many have reached a high place, wdio have 
had no "tincture of letters." Most of us 
must have known some, especially in the 
humbler places of society, who had not any 
of this world's learning, had never heard even 
the names of the greatest poets and philoso- 
phers, yet who, without help from these, had 
been led, by some secret way, up to the se- 
renest, most beautiful heights of character. 
It is indeed a many-chambered school. 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 175 

These were led tlirough some of its chambers 
to their end, we are being led through others. 
To those who, like ourselves, have large op- 
portunities of Culture placed within their 
reach, these are the instruments of the divine 
discipline. It is part of that discipline to put 
large opportunities in men's hands, and to 
leave it to themselves whether they will use 
or neglect them. There shall be no coercion 
to make us turn them to account. Occasions 
of learning and self-improvement come, stay 
with us for a while, then pass. And the 
wheels of time shall not be reversed to bring 
them back, once they are gone. If we neg- 
lect them, we shall be permanent losers for 
this life. We cannot say how much we may 
be losers hereafter. But if we do what we 
can to use them while they are granted, we 
shall have learnt one lesson of the heavenly 
discipline, and shall be the better prepared 
for the others, whether of action or endur- 
ance, which are yet to come. 

This view of our life as a process of edu- 
cation, which God seeks to carrv on in each 
man, is not, it may be granted, the view of 
God and of His dealino;s with us which suo*- 
gests itself when men first begin to think 
seriously. Neither is it one which it is easy 



176 COMBINATION OF 

to hold steadily amid all the distractions of 
time, or to defend against all objections that 
may be urged fi^om the anomalies that sur- 
rounds us. But I think it is one which will 
more commend itself as people advance. It 
will approve itself as setting forth an end 
which seems altogether worthy of Him who 
made us. 

And now I have come round to one of the 
leading thoughts with which I set out. Those 
who heard my first lecture may remember 
that it was stated as the end of Culture to 
set before the young a high and worthy aim 
or ideal of life, and to train in them the pow- 
ers necessary to attain it. It was further 
stated that wdiile each man should have in 
view an ideal which he should strive to reach, 
what that ideal should be is to be determined 
for each man by the natural gifts he is en- 
dowed with, and by the circumstances in 
which he finds himself placed. That end of 
Culture was then stated, and we passed on. 
But now I think the belief in a divine edu- 
cation open to each man and to all men, 
'takes up into itself all that is true in the end 
proposed by Culture, supplements and per- 
fects it. It is right that we should have an 
aim of our own, with something peculiar in it, 



RELIGION AND CULTURE. 1T7 

determined by our individuality and our sur- 
roundings ; but this may readily degenerate 
into exclusive narrowness, unless it has for a 
background the great thought, that there is 
a kingdom of God within us, around us, and 
above us, in which we, with all our powers 
and aims, are called to be conscious workers. 
Towards the forwarding of this silent, ever- 
advancing kingdom, our little work, what- 
ever it be, if good and true, may contribute 
something. And this thought lends to any 
calling, however lowly, a consecration which 
is wanting even to the loftiest self-chosen 
ideals. But even if our aim should be frus- 
trated and our work come to nau^iht, vet the 
failure of our most cherished plans may be 
more than compensated. In the thought 
that we are members of this kingdom, al- 
ready begun, here and now, yet reaching 
forward through all time, we shall have a 
reserve of consolation better than any which 
success without this could give. When we 
are young, if we are of an aspiring nature, 
we are apt to make much of our ideals, and 
to fancy that in them Ave shall find a good 
not open to the vulgar. And then that uni- 
rersal kingdom, which embraces in itself all 

true ideals, is, if not wholly disbelieved, yet 

12 



178 RELIGION AND CULTURE. 

thought of as remote. But as life goes on, 
the ideals we set before us, even if attained, 
dwindle in importance, and that kingdom 
grows. We come to feel that it is indeed the 
substance, those the shadows. Were it not 
well, then, to begin with the substance to learn 
to apprehend the reality of that kii*igdom 
which is all around us now, whether we 
recognize it or not, — to take our aims and 
endeavors into it, that they may be made 
part of it, however small, — to surrender our- 
selves to it, that our lives mav do somethino; 
towards its advancement, and that so we may 
become fellow-workers, however humble, 
with all the wise and ^ood who have gone 
before us, and with Him who made them 
what they were ? Only they who early thus 
begin 

" Through the world's long da}- of strife 
Still chant their morning song." 



APPEl^DIX. 



Note I. — Page 24. 

The following passages from Fichte's Lectures on 
the Nature of a Scholar (translation) illustrate the 
moral and religious root wliicli underlies all true cul- 
ture. Though these Lectures were meant to be pop- 
ular, they are still colored by the language of the 
author's philosophic system. By the " Divine Idea," 
especially, Fichte seems to have meant, not, as we 
might suppose, our ideas about God, but rather what 
we should express by the vx^ords the Divine Nature, 
or even God : — 

" In every age, the kind of education and spiritual 
culture, by means of which the age hopes to lead 
mankind to the knowledge of the ascertained part of 
the Divine Idea, is the learned culture of the age ; 
and every man who partakes in this culture is the 
scholar of the ao-e. . . . The whole of the traininor 
and culture, which an age calls learned education, is 
only a means towards a knowledge of the attainable 
portion of the Divine Idea, and is only valuable in so 
far as it actually is such a means, and truly fulfills its 
purpose." . . . 

" He onlv shall be esteemed as a scholar who, 
through the learned culture of his age, has actually 



180 APPENDIX, 

attained a knowledge of the Idea, or at least strives 
witli life and strenolh. to attain it. Throuo;h the 
learned culture of his age, I say ; for, if a man with- 
out the use of this means, can arrive at a knowledore 
of the Idea by some other means, (and I am far from 
denying that he may do so), yet such an one will be 
imable either to communicate his knowledge theo- 
retically, or to realize it immediately in the world 
according to any well-defined rule, because he must 
want that knowledo;e of his ao-e, and of the means of 
operating upon it, which can only be acquired in 
schools of learning." 

Again, '' Either the scholar has actually laid hold 
of the Divine Idea, in so far as it is attainable by 
man, or of a particular part of it, — has actually laid 
hold of it, and penetrated into its significance, until it 
stands lucid and distinct before him, so that it has 
become his own possession, an element in his person- 
ality ; and then he is a complete and finished scholar, 
a man who has gone through his studies : Or he as 
yet only strives and struggles to attain a clear insight 
into the Idea generally, or into a particular portion 
of it, from which he, for his part, will penetrate the 
whole : — already, one by one, sparks of light arise on 
every side, and disclose a higher world before him ; 
but they do not yet unite into one indivisible whole, 
— tliey vanish, as they came, without his bidding, 
and he cannot yet bring them under the dominion of 
his will ; — and then he is a progressive, a self-form- 
ing scholar, — a student. That it be really the Idea 
which is either possessed or struggled after is com- 
mon to both of these ; if the striving is Only after 
the outward form, the mere letter of learned cul- 
ture then we have; if the round is finished, the 



APPENDIX, 181 

complete, if it is unfinished, the progressive Bun- 
gler." 

Again, " Man is not placed in the world of sense 
alone, but the essential root of his being is, as we 
have seen, in God. Hurried along by sense and its 
impulses, the consciousness of this Life in God may 
be readily hidden from him ; and then, however 
noble may be his nature, he lives in strife and dis- 
union with himself; in discord and unhappiness, 
without true dignity and enjoyment of life. But 
when the consciousness of the true source of his ex- 
istence first rises upon him, and he joyfully resigns 
himself to it, till his being is steeped in the thought, 
then peace and joy and blessedness flow in upon his 
soul. And it lies in the Divine Idea that all men 
must come to this gladdening consciousness, — that 
the outward and tasteless Finite Life may be per- 
vaded by the Infinite, and so enjoyed ; and to this 
end, all who have been filled with the Divine Idea 
have labored and shall still labor, that this conscious- 
ness, in its purest possible form, may be spread through- 
out the race." 

This language is not exactly of Christian theology, 
but it is nearer to the kingdom of heaven than most 
utterances of British philosophy. 



Note n. — Pasce 34. 



This passage occurs in The Freeness of the Gospel, 
by the late Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. l\Tien the 
first of these lectures was delivered, he was yet alive. 
Before the closing one was given he had breathed his 



182 APPENDIX. 

last, on Sunday, the 20th March, 1870. The Freeness 
of the Gospel was first published nearly fifty years 
ago. For long the author had abstained from repub- 
lishing this or any of those other works which so 
deeply touched the minds of many in Scotland 
during the last generation. But in his latter days 
he had allowed a new edition of the work, from 
which this quotation is made, to be prepared by a 
friend and even himself dictated some corrections. 
This edition has appeared since tlie death of the 
revered author. 



Note m. — Pasre 36. 



For some of the thoughts here expressed on the 
influence of Greece, I am indebted to the first of Dr. 
Newman's Lectures on University Subjects. Especially 
in what I have said of Homer, I have ventured to 
adopt not only Dr. Newman's thought, but also some 
of his expressions. The passage in the original lec- 
ture is so graceful, and puts an old subject in so new 
a light, that it is here given more at length. 

" In the country which has been the fountain-head 
of intellectual gifts, in the age which preceded or in- 
troduced the first formations of Human Society ; in 
an era scarcely historical, we may dimly discern an 
almost mythical personage, who, putting out of con- 
sideration the actors in Old Testament history, may 
be called the first Apostle of Civilization. Like an 
Apostle in another order of things, he was poor and 
a wanderer, and feeble in the flesh, though he was 
to do such great things, and to live in the mouths 
of a hundred generations, and a thousand tribes. A 



APPENDIX. 183 

blind old man whose wanderings were such that, 
when he became famous, his birthplace could not be 
ascertained. 

** Seven famous towns contend for Homer dead, 
Th ough which the living Homer begged his bread." 

Yet he had a name in his day, and, little guessing 
in what vast measures his wish would be answered, 
he supplicated with a tender human feelingj as he 
wandered over the islands of the JSgean and the 
Asian coasts, that those who had known and loved 
him would cljerish his memory when he was absent. 
Unlike the proud boast of the Roman poet, if he 
spoke it in earnest, ' Exegi monumentum asre peren- 
nius,' he did but indulge the hope that one whose 
coming had been expected with pleasure might ex- 
cite regret when he went away, and be rewarded with 
the sympathy and praise of his friends, even in the 
presence of other minstrels. A set of verses remains, 
which is ascribed to him, in which he addresses the 
Delian women in the tone of feeling I have described. 
* Farewell to you all,' b^ says, ' and remember me 
in time to come ; and when any one of men on earth, 
a stranger from far, shall inquire of you, O maid- 
ens, who is the sweetest of minstrels hereabout, 
and in whom you most delight ? then make answer 
modestly, It is a blind man, and he lives in steep 
Chios.' 

" The great poet remained unknown for some cen- 
turies, — that is, unknown to w^hat we call fame. . . . 
At length an Athenian prince took upon him the task 
of o:atherin2r to!]^ether the scattered frao-ments of a 
genius which had not aspired to immortality, of re- 
ducing them to writing, and of fitting them to be the 



184 APPENDIX, 

text-book of ancient education. Henceforth the 
vagrant ballad-singer, as he might be thought, was 
submitted, to his surprise, to a sort of literary can- 
onization, and was invqeted with the office of form- 
ing the young mind of Greece to noble thoughts and 
bold deeds. To be read in Homer soon became the 
education of a gentleman ; and a rule, recognized in 
her free ag-e, remained as a tradition in the times of 
her degradation." 

Dr. Newman, it will be seen, holds by the old and 
natural belief that Homer was a man, not a myth. 
The great Teutonic hoax, wliich has so long glamoured 
the minds of the learned, seems to be somewhat 
losing its hold. It is a fair enough question whether 
the Iliad and the Odyssey are th6 work of the same 
author ; also, whether certain passages in these books 
may not be interpolations, and whether the great 
creative poet may not have incorporated into his 
work many fragments of earlier minstrelsy. But to 
suppose that each of two long continuous poems, the 
greatest in their kind the world has seen, were the 
product not of one mind, but of many minds, work- 
ing either with design or at haphazard, is too much 
for plain men to take in. 



Note IV. — Pao-e 58. 



The best exposition which I have met with of the 
inadequacy of the Phenomenalism, as a total account 
of the whole matter, is to be found in the late Pro- 
fessor Grcte's Exploratio PhilosopMca (published at 
Cambridge in 1865). In that work he thinks over 
once again the fundamental problems that lie at the 



\ 



APPENDIX. 185 

root of all philosophy. And though the style may be 
felt to be lengthy, tentative, and hesitating, yet all 
who care for the subjects he treats of will readily 
forget this for the entire freshness, honesty, and orig- 
inality of the thinking. His book reads as though 
you overheard a real thinker thinking aloud. And 
much of what may be regarded as defect of style 
may be put down to the entire candor and thor- 
oughness of the writer, caring far more for what he 
has to say, than for the manner in which he says it. 

The following are some of the contrasts he draws 
between the phenomenal and the philosophical point 
of view : — 

" The phenomenal verb is * Is ' in the sense of 
' exist,' with immediate applications of it to certain 
objects of our thought itself, the nature of the existr- 
ence, the grounds of our supposition of it, not enter- 
ing into consideration. The verb of philosophy, or 
when our point of departure is consciousness or our 
own personality, is one which has scarcely existence 
in popular language: we might consider it to be 
* feel ' used neutrally, or ^ feel ourselves ' (the Greek 
kx(S) with an adverb. In this consciousness, in the 
philosopher's point of view, is the root of all cer- 
tainty or knowledge. The problem of philosophy 
is the finding the relation between existence and 
this. ... 

" The phenomenal assumption is that the world of 
reality exists quite independently of being known by 
any knowing beings in it, just the same as it would 
exist if there were no knowledge or feeling in any 
members of it. The Berkeleian idealism is little 
more than the easy demonstration that this view, 
from a philosophical standing point, is untenable; 



186 APPENDIX. 

that the notion of existence, as distinguished from 
pereeivedness, is, nakedly and rudely stated, as ab- 
horrent to the philosopher as that of perceivingness 
and will, in any part of the matter the laws of which 
he is seeking, is to the phenomenalist. 

" I think the best way of our conceiving this phe- 
nomenalist spirit, carefully avoiding, in our intellec- 
tual conception of it, any moral approbation or dis- 
approbation of it, is to conceive what exists existing 
■without being known, — without any mind, or any- 
thing: like mind, havino; origfinated it or havins: been 
concerned with its origination or arrangement, so that 
when we find in it anything which we should describe 
as order or form, or composition, it is not that kind 
of order, or anything like it, which we mean when 
we speak of putting together anything ourselves with 
a meaning and a reason. The phenomenalist maxim 
must be to put nothing (mentally) in the universe 
beyond what we find there ; and wdiat we find there 
phenomenally is that, and nothing more, which com- 
municates with the various natural elements, nervous 
matter, ... of which our bodies are composed. We 
really, phenomenally, have no right to speak of 
order, arrangement, composition, ... in the uni- 
verse, all which are ideas belong-ino; to our own con- 
sciousness of active and constructive powers. The 
great rule of phenomenalism is to be sure that we 
do not do that which we always naturally do do, 
humanize the universe, recognize intelligence in it, 
have any preliminary faith, persuasion, suppositions 
about it, find ourselves, if I may so speak, at all at 
home in it, think it has any concern with us." — (pp. 
14,15). 

'* The point of the difference is that in the former 



APPEADIX. 187 

(the plienomenalist point of view) we look upon what 
we can find out by physical research as ultimate fact, 
as f^r as we are concerned, and upon conformity with 
this as the test of truth ; so that nothing is admitted 
as true except so far as it follows by some process of 
inference from this. In opposition to this, the con- 
trasted view is to the effect, that for philosophy, for 
our entire judgment about things, we must go be- 
yond this, or rather go further back than it. The 
ultimate fact really for us — the basis upon which all 
rests — being, not that things exist, but that we 
know them, i. e., think of them as existing. The 
order of things in this view is not existence first, and 
then knowledge ; but knowledge (or consciousness 
of self) first, involving or implying the existence of 
what is known, but logically at least prior to it, and 
conceivably more extensive than it. In the former 
viev/ knowledge about things is looked upon as a 
possibly supervening accident to them or of them. 
In the latter view, their knowableness is a part, and 
the most important part, of their reality or essential 
being. In the former view, mind or consciousness is 
supposed to follow, desultorily and accidentally, after 
matter of fact. In the latter view, mind or conscious- 
ness begins with recognizing itself as a part of an 
entire supposed matter of fact or universe, and next 
as correspondent, in its subjective character, to the 
whole of this besides as object, while the understand- 
ing; of this latter as knoum, trerminates into the notion 
of the recognition of other mind or reason in it." — 
(p. 50.) 

'' We are really conscious of a non ego as of an 
ego, we are not therefore the only existence, and fi^om 
this it seems to me to follow, that we have reason in 



188 APPENDIX. 

considering that in evolving (by thought) order and 
character, or somethingness out of mere disorder, — 
objects out of prae-objectal possibility — we are not 
the only mind at work. As much as we feel our- 
selves mind, we feel ourselves one mind, and that 
there may be others. We know things, therefore, 
not only because we are, but because there are things 
that can be known ; because there are things which 
have in them the quality or character of knowable- 
ness, ^. e., a counterpart or adaptedness to reason ; 
which is, however we like to describe it, the same as 
a mind or reason so far insubstantiated or embodied." 
~ (p. 58). 



Note Y. — Page 65. 

For this view of the double aspect of all human 
action — at least for the form in which it is here put 
— I desire to own my obligation to a very thought- 
ful and searching criticism of Mr. Huxley's Lecture 
which shortly after that Lecture was pubhshed ap- 
peared in the Spectator. It is one of many papers 
which from time to time appear in that periodical, 
foil of thought on the highest subjects, which is at 
once robust and reverential. Without in any meas- 
ure indorsing the political views of that periodical, 
T may be allowed here to express my admiration of 
the papers to which I allude. They are exclusively 
on philosophical or religious subjects, or rather on 
that border land where philosophy and religion 
meet. One may not always agree with all that 
they contain. But no thoughtful person, whatever 
his own views may be, can read them without being 



APPENDIX. 189 

braced in mind and spirit by tbeir atmosphere of 
thought. 

If I had at hand the number of the Spectator which 
contained the paper on Mr. Huxley's Lecture, I should 
have made some extracts from it in this place. But 
in default of this, I may be allowed, as it is pertinent 
to the subject of my second Lecture, to make the 
following quotation from the Spectator of July 30, 
1870: — "The most dangerous form of unbelief at 
the present time is what we may call the ' scientific,' 
which says, when it contents itself with negatives, 

* we do not find God or any of the spiritual things of 
which you speak in the world with which we have to 
do ; ' which o-oes further when it chooses to be agjo-res- 
sive, and says ^ your theology is very much in the way 
of the improvement and advance of the human rac^ 
and we will put it out of the way.' To this, in either 
mood, all theologies are alike. ... It is with this 
that the battle must be fought out, and to any one 
who can furnish weapons for it our deepest gratitude 
is due." 

To furnish such weapons is a task I do not now 
venture to undertake. There are, however, certain 
fundamental questions which may be suggested for 
the consideration of those who are in the state of 
scientific unbelief above described, and who yet are 
ciandid men, open to conviction. It may be asked, 
Do you really hold that the world with which science 
deals is the whole world of existence ? If there is a 
world of truth outside, or perhaps rather inside, of 
that which science is cognizant of, is no part of it to 
be believed till science has made it her own, and 
given us scientific grounds for believing it ? You 

• say that you do not find God in the world with 



190 APPENDIX. 

which you have to do. Is, however, this world of 
yours the only world that really exists V Is it even 
the most important world, — important, that is, if you 
consider all that man is, all that history proves him 
to be and to need V 

Or to put the same questions from another side. 
Are you quite sure that, with all your science, you 
have all the faculties necessary for apprehending all 
truth awake and active within you V May there not 
be other capacities of your being, than those scientific 
ones, which capacities you, in your entire absorption 
in science, have hitherto allowed to lie dormant ? 
And if so, may not these be just the very capacities 
required to make you feel the need of God, and to 
enable you to find Him ? 

The truly scientific man reverences all facts. Is 
not this one worth his consideration ? The verdict 
of all ages has pronounced, that the exclusively 
scientific man, he in whom the scientific side is 
everything, and the spiritual side, that is heart, con- 
science, spiritual aspiration, go for nothing, is but 
half a man, developed only on one side of his nature, 
and that not the highest side. If God is to be appre- 
hended at all in a vital way, and not merely as an 
intellectual abstraction, it must be first trom the. spir- 
itual side of our being, by the conscieiUM^ the spirit, 
the reverence that is in man, that he is mainly to be 
approached. This is the centre of the whole matter. 
From this side we must begin, however much may 
afterwards be added by experience and acquired 
knowledge. 

I had o-ot thus far in writino; this note when I met 
with the following passage in a paper on Dr. New- 
man's Grammar oj Assent^ which appeared in the 



I 



APPENDIX. 191 

« 

Quartn^ly Review of last July, and is relevant to tlie 
matter on hand. " There are two ideas of the Divine 
Being which spring respectively from two sets of first 
principles, — one of which gathers around conscience, 
the other around a physical centre. There is the 
idea of Him as a moral governor and judge, ex- 
pressed in the majestic language of inspiration, 
which proclaims the ' High and lofty one that inhab- 
iteth eternity, whose name is Holy ; keeping mercy 
for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and 
sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty.' And 
there is another idea of Him as the supreme mundane 
being, the impersonation of the causes which are at 
work in the development and completion of the vis- 
ible world ; who looks — we cannot say from heaven 
— with calm satisfaction upon the successful expan- 
sion of the oris^inal seed which commenced the for- 
mation of the vast material organism, — the universal 
spectator of the fabric of nature, the growth of art, 
and the progress of civilization. These two ideas of 
the Deity must make all the difference in the aspect 
in which a revelation presents itself to us ; the former 
will recommend such a revelation as that in the Old 
and New Testament to us ; the latter will create a 
whole foundation of thought in preliminary conflict 
with it." 

This passage seems to represent truly the two fun- 
damental tendencies of thought on this subject, which 
are seen abundantly exemplified in the present time. 
The scientific unbelief to which the Spectator alludes 
does not perhaps get so far as to assert a " Supreme 
Mundane Being/' but it is along this line of thought 
that it travels, and this is what it would assert if it 
cared or ventured to assert anything. The contest 



192 APPENDIX, 

between these two tendencies is a radical and irrec- 
oncilable one, — no compromise is possible. And I 
cannot imagine how any one who has once got into 
the purely physical way of conceiving the first origin 
of things can pass out of it into the moral and spir- 
itual conception, except by a radical change in his 
whole mode of thouo-ht, an inward awakenino; which 
shall make him know and feel experimentally the 
need of a spiritual and moral Being on whom his own 
being can repose, as it never can on any physical 
centre. 

Once more the old truth must be asserted that if 
we are to reach God at all, in any vital way, we must 
begin from the centre of conscience and the truths it 
contains, — from that in us which is highest and best, 
which highest and best, feeble though it be, is, we 
believe, the truest image we have of His real nature. 
This, in the relio;ious re^iion, is the centre of all lio;ht 
and heat. The moral and spiritual is primary and 
supreme. But it has always been felt that, start- 
ing from this centre, it is the function and duty of 
thought to radiate out, till it embraces and vitalizes 
all that is known and that exists. And now, more 
than ever, there is an urgrent demand that thouoht 
should do this, — that the bearing of the moral on 
the physical order should be more closely pondered, 
— that, if it might be, the point should be described, 
at which the Supreme will touches and moves the 
fundamental forces which make up the physical uni- 
verse. In this direction there lie whole worlds of 
undiscovered country, more important and interesting 
than any which philosophy and science have yet re-, 
claimed. But this conquest will not be achieved by 
any movement of thought which begins by denying 



APPENDIX. 193 

or throwing into the background those spiritual prin- 
ciples which are the most deeply rooted, and the most 
enduring, of any that are in man. 



Note YI. — Page 122. 

This thought, wliich has been often urged, and 
in many forms, is put very forcibly by the Rev. J. 
Llewelyn Davies in the preface to his book of ser- 
mons entitled The Go>ipel and Modern Life. 

It has since the publication of these sermons been 
elaborately drawn out by Dr. Newman with his pe- 
culiar power, and forms a leading portion of the argu- 
ment in his Grammar of Assent, 

The following quotation is from Mr. Davies's pref- 
ace : — 

" The arguments by which Christians of the firm- 
est faith are and have been always most powerfully 
moved, are not such as it is easy to lay out in contro- 
versy, or such as can be conveniently weighed and 
measured by logical instruments. . . . Christians are 
continuully tempted to do what all controversy solic- 
its them to do, namely, to argue as if their business 
was to estabhsh, in the light of the understanding, 
certain conclusions to which every rational person 
must assent. But this is to put the main point, the 
attractive action of God Himself, out of the question. 
If the end of God be what we hold it to be, to bring 
human souls to Himself, then the means He actually 
employs must be living and spiritual. They are likely 
to be inftnitely various and subtle, but they will deal 
principally with the conscience and the affections, 
God is likely — nay, is certain — to manifest Him- 



194 APPENDIX. 

self more and more in proportion to faith and love. 
Christian appeals belong naturally to a region that 
may be called mystical, or may be otherwise described 
as personal and spiritual. The experience of the 
inner life, rightly understood and tested, is the best 
evidence that can be adduced. Words which one 
man can say out of his heart may strongly move an- 
other man. If we will not acknowledo^e evidence of 
this kind, the evidence does not perish or lose its 
power, but we are simply remaining on the outside of 
the question. 

" No Christian need be ashamed of trying to rise 
into the sphere of those motives, and to submit to the 
government of those influences which have produced 
all that is best in Christendom. But the truth is 
that no one, Christian or non-Christian, can become 
serious and think of what he himself lives by and for, 
without appealing to considerations which may incur 
the taunt of being personal and mystical." 



Note VH. — Page 139. 

" When, then, even an unlearned person thus 
trained, — from his own heart, from the action of 
his mind upon itself, from struggles with self, from 
an attempt to follow those impulses of his own 
nature which he feels to be highest and noblest, 
from a vivid natural perception (natural, though 
cherished and strengthened by prayer ; natural, 
though unfolded and diversified by practice ; nat- 
ural, though of that new and second nature which 
God the Holy Ghost gives), from an innate, though 
supernatural perception of the great vision of truth 



APPENDIX. 195 

"whicli is external to him (a perception of it, not in- 
deed in its fullness, but in glimpses, and by fits and 
seasons, and in its persuasive influences, and through 
a courageous following on after it, as a man in the 
dark might follow after some dim and distant light), 
— I say, when a person thus trained from his own 
heart, reads the declarations and promises of the 
Gospel, are we to be told that he believes in them 
merely because he has been bid believe in them? 
Do we not see that he has something in his own 
breast which bears a confirming testimony to their 
truth ? He reads that the heart is ^ deceitful above 
all things and desperately wicked,' and that he in- 
herits an evil nature from Adam, and that he is still 
under its power, except so far as he has been re- 
newed. Herfe is a mystery ; but his own actual 
and too bitter experience bears witness to the truth 
of the declaration ; he feels the mystery of iniquity 
within him. He reads that * without holiness no 
man shall see the Lord ; ' and his own love of what 
is true and lovely and pure approves and embraces 
the doctrine as coming from God. He reads that 
God is angry at sin, and will punish the sinner, and 
that it in a hard matter, nay, an impossibility, for us 
to appease His wrath. Here, again, is a mystery ; 
but here, too, his conscience anticipates the mystery, 
and convicts him ; his mouth is stopped. And when 
he o;oes on to read that the Son of God has Himself 
come into the world in our flesh, and died upon the 
Cross for us, does he not, amid the awful mysterious- 
ness of the doctrine, find those words fulfilled in him 
which that gracious Saviour uttered : ' And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me ? ' 
He cannot choose but believe in Him. He says, * 



196 APPENDIX. 

Lord, Thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed.' " 
— Dr. Newman's ParocJiial and Plain Sermons (Ed. 
1868), vol. viii. pp. 117-119. 



Note YIII. — Page 165. 



" We are not to be impatient of mystery — which 
encompasses us on all sides. Our God gives us light, 
and we are to walk in it and rejoice in it ; but this 
light seems to have ever beyond it a region of dark- 
ness. The light is not on that account less truly 
light, and to be trusted in as light. To permit dark- 
ness to bring light into question — to feel sure of 
nothino; because we cannot know all thino-s — is in 
truth to do violence to the constitution of our being, 
to which, if we are faithful, we shall know light to 
be really light, whatever outer circle of darkness 
may make itself felt by us. Let us thankfully rejoice 
in the light and reverently submit to the darkness. 
And let us welcome that o-radual widenino; of the 
region of light, of which we have experience, the 
retiring of the circle of encompassing darkness. 
How far remaining darkness may yet give place to 
light now or hereafter in the endless eternity before 
us we know not. In the mean time we honor the 
light by obeying it, and in so doing honor God, 
while we honor Him also by a right aspect of our 
minds towards the darkness, accepting our limits in 
the faith of the wise Jove which appoints them. For 
if we are giving God glory in what He gives us to 
know, it will not be difficult to give Him the further 
glory of being peaceful and at rest concerning the 



i 



APPENDIX, 197 

darkness which remains ; not doubting that what we 
know not must be in harmony with what we know ; 
and would be seen by us to be so, if God saw it 
good that the remaining darkness should altogether 
pass away : if indeed it is possible in the nature of 
things that it should pass away. For we can believe 
that much is embraced in the divine consciousness 
and in the relation of the creature to God, which it 
may be incompatible with creature limits that we 
should know. Yet on the other hand that is a large 
word, ' Then shall we know even as we also are 
known.' " — Christ the Bread of Life, by John M'Leod 
Campbell, D. D. (Second Edition), pp. 157, 158. 



it X 178 




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